That Which Was Lost
by Dr. Jekyl
Summary: Benezia T'Soni survived the events of Noveria, but spent the entire war in stasis. Revived in the wake of the Reaper's defeat, she now has to adapt to a galaxy where her homeworld is in ruins, her former bondmate is her unhappy minder and her daughter is an angry stranger. Benezia/Aethyta, FemShep/Liara.
1. Prologue

**A/N:**  
- Firstly, a very big thank you to the wonderful **jt-boi**, who has taken on the unenviable task of beta-reading this piece. If you haven't checked out their work yet, you should! Another big thank you goes out to everyone on the kmeme who's been following this since the beginning and providing such wonderful (and useful!) feedback.  
- Secondly, this work does come with a **trigger warning** for some non-con overtones and allusions, because I don't think it's really possible to look at indoctrination in general and Benezia's situation in particular without at least touching on that.**  
**- Thirdly this, is, yes, another kmeme fill, but one that rather took on a life of its own. Updates here will probably happen fairly regularly until we get caught up to where the story is currently on the meme, and slow after that.**  
**

* * *

**Prologue**

Liara allowed herself a little more than a week, in the end. Two days to simply sleep, another three to heal, one to mourn and the rest to hover by Shepard's bedside, half an eye on the various medical monitors while she worked, trying to pull together what remained of her network and make some sense of the ruined galaxy. Not even two weeks, and even then it was more than she could afford to spare. Events were moving forward apace, faster than her ability to plan for them, and the few reports that had come in from the Republics were troubling, to say the least. By rights, she probably should have been aboard the first vessel bound for Thessia the moment she'd been capable of walking again.

Leaving now, though, meant that she wouldn't be there if- _w__hen _Shepard woke up. But she needed to go, and go now. Liara had a duty to her people as well as to Shepard, and she'd do far more good organising things on her homeworld and lending what support she could to their friends than she could ever hope to whilst hovering over a hospital bed. Leaving was the right thing to do, no matter how traitorous it felt. Shepard would have to understand. She knew about duty. She'd know that Liara had hated to leave her.

But even with the teary, wordless farewell behind her, there were still one or two things that needed taking care of before she could set foot upon the world of her birth again. This was one of the last of them, and easily proving to be the most difficult. She'd hidden in the ship's small cabin in dread of it, silly and childish though it was, until now. She, who had defeated the Shadow Broker, had summoned Kalros, had charged down the crater towards the beam of light and certain death, _afraid_? It was ludicrous. But then again, she'd always been much better at taking action than dealing with other people.

"Gilsame? Why are we detouring to Gilsame?" Aethyta said, checking the navigation database on the small freighter Liara had not so much requested as demanded the Systems Alliance loan her. Being one of the now-legendary Normandy crew had to have a few benefits, she'd decided, to go along with what remained of her clout at the Broker. "Two days out of the way for a ball of radioactive ice _pirates _wouldn't bother with."

"We need to collect someone," Liara allowed, hearing the tension in her own voice.

Aethyta heard it too, and gave her a hard look.

"One of your 'agents'?"

Liara was not certain exactly how much Aethyta knew about her activities, only that it was more than she'd let on and certainly much more than she'd relayed to the other matriarchs. Beneath Aethyta's direct, temperamental manner sat a very sharp mind, and she'd certainly hinted, more than once, that she found it extremely unlikely that at Liara and the Shadow Broker had put aside their conflict in order to focus on the Reapers, no matter the 'official' story.

"No. They will- I..."

She wrung her hands nervously together as she looked at her father. Liara had quickly come to genuinely like her other parent, but didn't know her anywhere near well enough to judge how she'd react to her news, and she really needed to win her over for this. In the end, she decided to plumb for blunt honesty. Plainly-spoken as she was, Aethyta would have to appreciate that, at least.

"There is no easy way to say this," she said, ignoring the way her heart hammered in her ears, "so I'm just going to come out with it."

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, and only then did she dare meet her other parent's eyes.

"Mother is still alive."


	2. Aethyta (one)

**One: Aethyta  
**

* * *

Aethyta Argyris, matriarch of the asari, spy, saboteur, inadvertent hero of the Citadel and the best damned bartender this side of the galactic core watched as her youngest daughter worked the controls of the stasis pod and tried to sort out exactly what she, herself, was feeling. Anger? Yes. _Hell_ yes. Pissed off didn't even _begin_ to cover it. It had taken all of her not-inconsiderable willpower to stop herself from smacking the kid so hard that she'd have thought Aethyta was Kurinth herself, descended from the heavens to kick the blue from her ass. The nerve, the goddess-damned _nerve_of her, sitting on a secret like that, lying to her face about it. Two days later and she was still simmering.

And, damn it, she was still plenty angry with the kid's mother too. Forgiveness had come one hell of a lot easier when she'd thought Benezia dead. 'Time heals', 'cherish the moments together' and all of that varrenshit. The unexpected revelation of Benezia's survival and further realisation that she was going to see her former bondmate again had brought a lot of things she'd thought long-buried back to the surface, few of them pleasant. Anger, resentment, hurt, dread-

Dread?

"Are you sure that this is a good idea?" she said, giving voice to the last thought. "I mean, after what happened..."

"Honestly?" The kid paused momentarily in her work to look up and over at her. Her good eye sparkled in the dim lights of the freighter's cramped cargo bay. "No. I'm not. She made a mistake. A big one. And we don't really know anything about the long-term effects of indoctrination." Liara sighed and laid her hand gently atop the stasis pod, before returning to her work. "But Shepard believes in second chances. So do I."

Aethyta couldn't quite help the dismissive snort that escaped her.

"You're about the only ones."

"I know. And that's why I need you. I need someone who knows that it was Saren and Sovereign who did those horrible things, not her."

And that, right there, was why, despite her anger at the pair of them and everything else besides, she'd ultimately agreed to go along with this harebrained scheme. At least for a little while. Nezzie was a victim here. She'd done a stupid, if well-intentioned thing and gotten herself in over her head with no-one standing by to pull her back out again if it went tits up. Which, of course, it had. But Benezia, at the time, had no way of knowing what Sovereign truly was or was capable of. Hell, the handful of people who'd even been aware of its existence back then had thought that it was just some sort of overgrown dreadnought, and Saren just a Spectre a little more off kilter than most of that breed, wanting to use geth to rule the galaxy.

Geth. Huh. If only it had actually been _geth_. Geth would have been a fucking cakewalk compared to the Reapers, what with their twisted monsters and mind control.

She sighed and moved over for a better look at the pod, her footsteps swallowed up by the crates and containers of the supply stockpile they'd spent the day shifting here from the bunker. The pod was an older model, medical, the sort used by a better class of merc companies to keep wounded soldiers alive until they could be properly seen to. Compact, with few bells and whistles aside from the enhanced power supply, but all the more robust because of it. The scratched windows on this one had fogged over during the transfer from the tiny bunker on Gilsame to the ship, rendering Benezia little more than a pale blue blur beneath them. Aethyta wiped her hand across one cloudy panel; it came away damp, with a slight squeaking noise.

"You never gave me a straight answer for why you did it."

The kid went still for a long moment, hands motionless at the controls. The uneven lighting in the bay cast dark shadows across her face as she bowed her head.

"The last shot was mine," she said, finally, quietly.

Oh. Crap. That little detail hadn't been in the official report, or the unofficial one either. She knew from personal experience that losing your parents at such a young age could fuck you up pretty good for a few decades, but shooting, _killing _your own mother - it was the kind of thing that could scar you for life. A little bit of her anger towards the girl drained away.

A little bit.

"I didn't mean _that_," she replied awkwardly, feeling like the mother of all heels, but pressed on anyway. "I can understand _saving _her. She's your mother. But why keep it a secret?"

Liara shrugged, a subdued movement, and returned once to work once more.

"At first we thought we might be able to, I don't know, figure out exactly what had happened to her. How to help her break free permanently and stop it from happening to other people. But nobody believed us about the Reapers, even after they attacked the Citadel. An unimaginable invasion fleet waiting in dark space? Mind control? It all sounded so... fantastic." She shook her head slightly. "With Saren dead, the Council would have used her as a scapegoat. More than they did anyway. She would have been publicly tried as traitor and imprisoned. Maybe even executed. And she still would have been under Reaper control throughout. I... I couldn't do that to her."

The kid finished the last of the diagnostics and looked back up at her.

"Everything's green," she said. Her voice held and odd mixture of satisfaction and concern. "Are you ready?"

"Well," Aethyta sighed and cracked her knuckles, "I guess I'd better be."


	3. Benezia (two)

**Two: Benezia  
**

* * *

"You know, for someone so smart, you always could be so damned stupid. What the blue hell _were _you thinking?"

It took a few seconds for Benezia to open her eyes and focus on the figure seated at the end of her bed, straddling a chair backwards, watching her impassively. It took several more to put a name to the face.

"Aethy..?" she said, startled when her voice came out as little more than a rusty whisper. Goddess, she felt absolutely dreadful. She ached everywhere, her side and stomach worst of all. Her mouth was like sand, her eyes and throat raw and scratchy with each slow blink and breath. All strength seemed to have left her limbs. And her head. Goddess, her _head_.

"You remember who I am. Well, that's a start, I guess. Do you know who _you _are?"

"Of course," she rasped, puzzled by such an odd question, especially coming from Aethyta. And... yes, that was wrong, too. What was Aethy doing here? They weren't... They hadn't... "I am Benezia T'Soni, Matriarch of the asari and..." _Tool, servant, plaything _a dark, unctuous voice within her supplied. Her head started to pound with force. The room swam, nausea rising in her stomach. "...and..."

Aethyta frowned.

"Hmmph. Do you know how you got here then?"

"I..." Her shaking hand flew unconsciously to her temple as she struggled to pierce the fog roiling inside her mind. The room was unfamiliar. Barely furnished and small, cramped with just two occupants, the square metal walls suggested 'ship', and not one of asari design. How had she gotten here? She could remember... "I... was on Noveria. The rachni queen. I... needed to find the Mu relay. There was a battle. I was trying to..." Her hand dropped as the memory reached its conclusion. "Goddess, Liara! She was-"

Aethyta's expression shifted from cool distance into something approaching compassion.

"Relax - the kid's fine. Well, maybe not one hundred per cent _fine_, but she's alive, anyway, and that's more than most can say. She'll be here in a bit."

"She... knows?"

She'd always meant to tell Liara about Aethyta, but had never been able to find the right words when Liara was younger. Eventually, to Benezia's guilty relief, the girl had stopped asking. And then, later, when she'd thought Liara might be old enough to understand something of love in all of its aching contradictions, they'd fought, all but stopped speaking. Liara had enacted her quiet rebellion, as all maidens must eventually distance themselves from their mothers, and she had reacted... badly. It was obvious with hindsight, and some part of her had even realised it at the time, but, despite all her years, despite all her supposed 'wisdom', she had been hurt by Liara's desire to leave her, and terrified by the prospect of her shy Little Wing going out into the dangerous galaxy on her own. Liara was her only daughter. She would always want to hold her close, keep her safe.

Her only daughter.

She had tried to kill her only daughter.

"Yeah, she knows," Aethyta was saying. "She's a smart kid. But that's not the issue here. Look, we know that the Reap- that Sovereign was fucking with your head."

The name sent a finger of dread and revulsion down her spine. Sovereign. Saren's ship. But not just a ship, something she'd discovered far too late. So many dead, so many used, herself among them.

Her pride. Her blindness. Her fault.

"We know that you fought him too. Broke free, even. But we need to know what the damage is. If you can be trusted again. We don't have a lot of experience in dealing with people who survive indoctrination to the level you had it. Most of 'em died in the war, or offed themselves straight after."

"War?" The word cut through her rising revulsion at herself. She'd been trying to prevent a war. Somehow. That's why she'd gone along with Saren. Another finger of disgust shivered its way down her spine. "What war?"

Aethyta sighed, heavily, suddenly looking all of her thousand-odd years.

"It only ended a couple of weeks ago so it doesn't have a proper name yet. But the long and short of it is Sovereign's buddies showed up and the whole galaxy went to hell. I've never seen anything like it." She shook her head slowly, almost as if in awe. "_Conservative _estimate is we've lost two thirds of the galactic population. The batarians are pretty much done for as a species and we might not have enough elcor left for a viable population either. And, well, our people are only a bit better off. Some of the smaller colony worlds seem to have come through ok, but Thessia..."

Benezia stared at her in open-mouthed horror. But the shock of Aethyta's words was enough to finally kick her brain into some semblance of action. She could remember being shot on Noveria, quite clearly. The pain of it had been enough to break Saren's hold on her again. She'd felt herself bleeding out, sliding down towards darkness, and had begged them to let her pass on before the monster claimed her once more. But then Liara had been at her side, begging her to stay while two armoured figures worked with clumsy haste to slather her wounds with medigel...

A war of the scale Aethyta was talking about would take time. Years. Time enough for Liara to find and meet her other parent. But when Benezia touched her side, now, above the bullet wound, the skin was still raw and tender. If she'd been unconscious, in a coma over the intervening period, she would have healed.

"How long have I been in stasis?"

"Four years. Or there abouts. But don't think about that now. There's going to be a lot to take in. You'll need to work up to it slowly."

"Four years?" Her voice, to her own ears, was incredulous. Two-thirds of the galaxy, gone in just four years? That seemed hardly time enough for a war of that scale. She'd seen visions of the devastation that Sovereign and the monsters had caused before, but even so...

She blinked, and one of the visions Saren had gifted to her flitted behind her eyes.

_Out in the darkness of intergalactic space, the great fleet sat, each ship a nation unto itself, alive and malevolent and unstoppable. One by one they woke; one by one suns darkened, worlds burned, races died._

But there was a way for them all to survive this cycle. Saren had found it. He'd shown her: surrender. Pride was not worth the price.

"And Saren?" she heard herself ask.

"Dead. You actually have our girl to thank for that." Aethyta smiled, some of the age dropping away from her face again. "You did a good job with her."

"I can only agree, really," a new voice chimed in as the door slid open, a voice she would know anywhere. Soft, breathy, slightly hesitant...

Liara.

There was a lengthy pause, the three of them frozen in tableau.

"I'll leave you two to it," Aethyta eventually said, with a tact most would be startled to learn that she possessed. "I bet you've got a bit to talk about."

Benezia watched silently as her daughter carefully maneuvered her way into the small room and past Aethyta, a laden tray clasped in both hands and a datapad tucked under one arm. She looked, to a mother's eye... different. Older. More than four years would suggest. Gone were the soft, subdued contours of youth, replaced by the full figured body of a maiden in her prime. Darker skin. Better posture. New, hard muscle beneath... armour? She'd taken it for a new work uniform at first, but up close it was clearly a ballistics weave with solid ceramic plating, well-used, well-fitted and likely custom-made.

And her face... Goddess, her _face_.

Almost the entire right side of her daughter's face was a mess of raw scar tissue, bisected by a thin, diagonal band of untouched skin across her cheek. Below the band and across the line of her cheekbone to her nose, the skin was puckered and pitted, drawn tight enough to pull the corner of her mouth up slightly. The same scarring continued under her jawline and down the front and to one side of her neck. Worse, though, was the area around her eye, a single, livid, indigo burn extended halfway up her forehead. She wore a simple fabric patch, white, over the eye.

"She's not what I expected," Liara said, watching the door close behind Aethyta.

"What did you expect?" she heard herself ask. Her voice was remarkably level.

"Someone more like you, I suppose." Liara shrugged slightly and turned back to lay the tray down carefully on the small shelf beside the bed. She then sat upon the edge of the bed itself, rather than seeking out the so-recently vacated chair. "Hello, Mother."

When their eyes met for the first time, Benezia suddenly felt the full weight of her shame and looked away.

Her daughter, her dearest Little Wing. She had tried her best to kill her. It had seemed the only logical course of action at the time. Worse, far worse: a part of her could still understand that logic, feel the echo of frustration at the Spectre's continued interference in their plans and the rage that the human thought her weak enough to be swayed by ties of blood.

"Mother, please."

When Benezia allowed herself to look back up again, there were tears in her daughter's remaining eye as she spoke the words.

"Liara..." her throat was suddenly tight, tears blurring her own vision. "Goddess, what happened..? I didn't-"

Her trembling hand drifted up of its own accord to cup a scarred, mangled cheek, fingertips brushing the eyepatch. What little remained of Benezia's heart broke when Liara's right hand came up to cover hers, and she realised that the little finger of it was gone, along with the tips of the next two, scarring to match her face and neck down the back of her hand until her skin disappeared beneath a suspiciously new section of armour.

"No. This was Harbinger's work. The burns will heal eventually, and there are prosthetics these days that are even better than the real thing. In the meantime, it will certainly teach me not to wear a proper helmet," Liara said with a tight smile that only fully moved one side of her face, and drew their hands away. "I've missed you."

"And I you," she replied, letting the tears fall. How close had they come to losing each other? "Liara, I-"

"Later, Mother," her daughter interrupted gently, squeezing her hand. "How are you feeling? Honestly?"

How was she feeling? Oh, what a question to ask...

"Thirsty," she supplied, deliberately focusing on the physical. "Weak."

"Any pain?"

"Some. My side." She tried to sit and winced, and then Liara's arms were there, helping her up. "My chest."

"I am afraid that we had to put you into stasis straight out of surgery. We couldn't risk you waking up of your own accord. You were shot three times. The areas around the wounds will be tender for a few more days," Liara said apologetically, arranging the pillows behind her so she could settle back. The next question from her, though, when it came, came sharp, and without any apology whatsoever:

"And how is your head?"

"My... head?" The pain was excruciating, flaring with each slight movement of her body. "There is some discomfort."

She felt her gaze drop, a little, at the half-lie. Her daughter had always had a good heart; if she knew the extent of the pain, she would certainly want to help alleviate it. But a headache was such a little punishment for all that she had done and tried to do, and Benezia would seek no relief from it. She deserved _something_ for living when so many others had not.

"Mother, look at me," Liara demanded. Benezia was startled enough by the unexpected note of command in her voice that she obeyed all but instantly; their eyes, the same shade of blue, locked.

"What happened with Saren was _not your fault_," her daughter said firmly. "You had no way of knowing what Sovereign really was and what it was capable of. Indoctrination is... insidious. Most people fell completely under its sway without even realising it. But _you _recognised it. You fought it with every fibre of your being. And I am... proud of you for doing so."

Proud? How could Liara be proud of her? She had done terrible things. Unspeakable things. She had led her followers to the slaughter. She'd killed. She had forcibly violated the minds of others. She had worked against her people. _She had tried to kill her own daughter_.

Her stomach churned, bile rising in her throat. There was too much to forgive for any sort of pride in her.

"But, even with the Reapers gone," Liara continued, apparently heedless of her inner turmoil, "we can't be sure that you're completely free of their influence yet. We don't know enough about how indoctrination works, and what the long-term effects on the survivors are. If we are going to get through this, you _must _be completely open with me. And Aethyta. We must know if you have headaches, see visions, hear humming or voices, or feel the urge to do odd things."

The headaches had been the first overt sign of their downfall. Dear little Umbri, the youngest of her entourage, had been struck down by debilitating pains in her head that lasted for days. The rest had followed, in ones and twos, over the next few months, herself last of all. She remembered, at the outset, being concerned by the spate of sudden illness. She'd even considered using it as an excuse to abandon her mission and leave that horrible ship and its dangerous master behind, but had shrugged the feeling off once the pains had proven only temporary. And besides, all of the afflicted had been so certain of the importance of their mission, insistent on staying...

But had that been her or Saren who had decided that they should stay? Had she unwittingly doomed them all in her arrogance, or had she already been under the sway of the monster, even then? Either way, they were all dead now, her followers. She had killed some of them personally, taken by fits of rage and nihilism. The lives of the others may as well have been taken by her hand as well.

"It was not your fault," Liara repeated, gently, when she didn't reply, and squeezed her hand again.

"But it was, Liara," she heard herself whisper, gaze falling to her lap. "Goddess, it was. I should have known better. I should-"

Her fragile resolve finally broke when Liara drew her into a hug, holding her tightly. Tears came again, hot and fast, tremors wracking her body as she clung to her daughter for support.

"-I'm sorry. I'm so sorry..."


	4. Aethyta (three)

**Three: Aethyta**

* * *

"How'd it go?"

The kid shrugged as she took up the co-pilot's seat.

"Better than I had expected. Not as well as I'd hoped," she sighed. "Did she say much to you?"

"Not a lot. But then, she didn't have to," Aethyta conceded, taking the opportunity to study the kid out of the corner of her eye. Behind a set of scars that would have made Aethyta's own father incredibly envious, she seemed tired. Upset, but working not to show it. "You alright?"

"Fine, I suppose," Liara sighed, rubbing unconsciously at the scars on her neck. "It's just... difficult, seeing her like this. She was always so strong and confident. She's sleeping now. I've rigged up a monitor, in case she wakes and we're not there."

"Hmm," she acknowledged, fishing beside her own chair for the bottle and two glasses she'd had the foresight to store there earlier. Benezia had always been strong and confident, but in an incredibly understated, grounded kind of way. It was part of what had made her so damned sexy, back when they'd been together. She had brains and power enough that she didn't feel the need to flaunt them. Asses were great for passing glances, and tits could get you a fair bit too, but confidence would always be the galaxy's number one aphrodisiac.

She hadn't seen much of that confidence in freighter's small cabin. In more than a century of being together, Benezia T'Soni had become an open book to her, and all she'd seen, writ large across her face, was confusion, fear, pain and burgeoning self-loathing. None of that boded well for the next few days.

Aethyta deftly poured two glasses and offered one to the kid, who took it without a word. If she'd missed all the other warning signs, that would have been a clear enough signal that something was amiss. The kid wasn't much of a drinker, even socially, more the sort to sit and nurse a single glass of wine for half the night. When upset, she worked rather than self-medicated, a trait she shared with Benezia. It was only when there was no work to be done, or when work itself was the problem, that she turned to booze.

Liara took a cautious sip, brows arching in surprise before a hint of a smile ghosted her lips.

"What, no ryncol?"

So Liara T'Soni had a sense of humour about her heritage after all.

"Nah." She returned the smile with one of her own. "I'll let you in on a little secret, kid: I never much liked the stuff."

"Really? And here I thought you were 'half-krogan'."

"Yeah, but I got my mom's sense of taste, and rycnol's one step below prison moonshine. Besides, when you work in bars and clubs for as long as I have, and you learn to appreciate the good stuff."

"I don't know much about alcohol, but this is quite nice. Sweet but spicy, at the same time. What is it?"

"One hundred-fifty year-old Niacali metheglin," she took a long, slow sip from her own glass and sighed with satisfaction. "Nothing better. I've been saving it for a special occasion."

"'Saving it'?" Liara asked dryly. "I was under the impression you managed to escape from the Citadel with nothing more than your shotgun and the clothes on your back."

Caught out in a little lie, Aethyta shrugged, and took another pull, savouring the sweetness, the spice and the burn. The frantic fight and subsequent flight from the Citadel was not something that she particularly cared to remember. With C-Sec utterly overrun by Reaper troops, she'd done what she could to assist – and then organise - the civilian evacuation. A lot of people had died in the chaos, a lot more than she'd been able to save, and the survivors had called her a hero for it. Just because she was old enough to know how to keep her head in a crisis, and had a loud, authoritative voice.

"Well, I _did _have a bottle I was saving," she said. "It's in orbit somewhere now. I might have 'liberated' this one from an abandoned bar on Earth."

The kid made a slightly disapproving 'tsk' sound, but took another, longer sip anyway.

"So, this counts as a special occasion?"

"Well, the war's over, we won, and we're finally on our way back to Thessia," she said, ticking each point off on one of her fingers. "I don't know about you, but I'm inclined to drink to all three."

"And I suppose it is a family reunion, of a sort."

She couldn't quite stop the scowl that formed as she stared down into her half-empty glass. You couldn't have a family reunion if you'd never been a family.

"You're still angry with me." It wasn't a question.

"Of course I'm still angry!" Aethyta shot back, letting it rise back to the surface again. "We talked about her for _hours_ and you didn't say a damned thing. You didn't even _hint_."

"What was I supposed to say?" Liara replied, her own anger evidentially rising. "'Oh, and by the way, she's not actually dead?' I'd known you for a few weeks at most. And you were _spying_ on me for the _asari government_! How would they have reacted to that news, exactly?"

"It would've gone down like a drunken elcor," she allowed. "But that doesn't make me any less pissed off about it! You shoulda told me."

"Perhaps," Liara conceded, settling back. "And maybe I would have, if we'd had more time to get to know each other."

"If 'ifs' were butts, it'd be raining asses," Aethyta groused, knocking back the rest of her drink too quickly for something of such quality. "'If we'd had more time'. 'If there wasn't a war on'. If Benezia hadn't-"

"You still have feelings for her," Liara interrupted quietly, with rather more insight than Aethyta would have liked.

"Yeah, and they're not all good ones," she shot back, anger flaring again.

Every asari of a certain age had at least one story of a relationship that had ended too quickly for comfort. She'd eventually come to accept that Benezia would be hers, and had tried to content herself with the memories of near-on a hundred and twenty years together. Benezia had left her, and she'd let her go. That was where the story should have ended. There was too much history between them now for anything else. Too many unsaid words, too many angry thoughts and too many broken promises.

"Look, I don't know what sort of twisted fantasies you've got up in that little head of yours, but we're not here to play 'happy families'. Once we're certain she's still all there upstairs and not going to try to bring back the Reapers or do something else that stupid, I'm out. I've got my own business to attend to. Is that clear?"

Liara looked down into her own glass and sighed.

"Crystal."


	5. Benezia (four)

**Four: Benezia**

* * *

Benezia T'Soni lay staring silently at the ceiling in the darkened room. She was alone save for the hum of the ship around her, and the slow, reassuring rhythm of Aethyta's breathing as she slept in the cot beside the door.

She had eaten and drank and slept herself, for a time. Physically at least, she felt all the better for it, the dull aches of her body subsiding, though the pain in her temples was only a little diminished. A shower had been promised in the morning, along with a reprieve from bed, and she found herself honestly looking forward to both. She felt unclean, as if her skin crawled with filth, and, bound to bed, she had nothing to do but think. And remember.

_"Can't you see?" said Saren. His taloned hand gripped her shoulder tightly enough to draw blood. "Surrender. Cooperate. It's the only way we can survive."_

"Yes," she said, covering his talons with her hand, ignoring the pain, the intrusion into her personal space, and instead reached for his mind with her own, past the jagged edges and strange echoes and frantic whirl of thought into the unshakeable certainty beneath. "I see."

And she did.

She shuddered and fumbled at her side for the datapad Liara had left for her, flicking it on so that she was bathed in the glow of the small screen. With the extranet apparently inaccessible, the only content on the device was preloaded and sparse: a timeline of the war of sorts, starting just prior to her arrival on Noveria, and some associated codex entries, dossiers, news reports and vid clips. Limited, certainly, but it was at least a distraction, and some bridge to understanding her current situation.

She was three years dead, and a traitor.

While the former had come as something of a shock, she hadn't been particularly surprised by the latter. She _was_ a traitor. A criminal and worse. But _dead_? How were they now to explain away the fact that she wasn't?

The lie had been told skilfully, and often enough that even her fellow matriarchs believed - that, at least, was evident. In the relevant interviews, editorials, speeches and analyses included on the device, she would have seen some signs, subtle ones, that they were laying the groundwork for her eventual return, be it for imprisonment or, less likely, exoneration. She saw none.

It was also evident that her 'death', the circumstances around it, had shaken asari politics deeply, seeing a marked shift in power away from her own faction. She would not be being immodest if she said that she was- _had been - _one of Thessia's leading voices. She'd been able to sway important debates with her presence alone, set new policies at a galactic level and guide the direction of her people with little more than a quiet word in the right ear. For her, of all people, to fall from grace, in such as spectacular, public and, above all else, abrupt fashion...

She closed her eyes and tried to play it out in her head, forcing herself to think through the pain. Pain was good. Pain was her mind resisting the channels of thought that Saren had ingrained within her.

Her friends, of course, would have been horrified. Particularly affected would have been Effy, Gaiana and Rosi, who'd shared her concern at the possibility of a Spectre - of Saren - going rogue. The turian was powerful, wealthy, influential, and an extremely effective agent for the Council, but had begun to show signs of instability that his masters and, indeed, most of their own peers seemed wilfully blind to. When their careful investigation had hinted that there might be some truth to the rumours that Saren was looking for means to pursue his poorly-hidden vendetta against the humans, they'd been forced to act. A turian Spectre attacking humans and human colonies? With tensions between the two races already fraught, the actions of even a single rogue agent could spark a new war.

Of the four of them, Benezia had been best placed to act, already having ties to the turian through Binary Helix. They'd spent years carefully manoeuvring her into exactly the right position, helping her befriend him so that she might be drawn into his confidences enough to begin to sway him.

Her 'death' would have been a severe blow for her friends on both a personal and a political level. Privately, they would likely have felt responsible for the outcome of events, and she thought that they would have loved her well enough to grieve at her passing, whatever the exact circumstances. Publically, though, they would have lost standing, tainted by association even as they would have been forced to disavow her. Their proposals and reforms would likely have stalled, all of their decisions and ideas, past and present, subject to greater scrutiny from their peers and from the masses. Many ideas would have to be abandoned for several decades at least, if not entirely. After all, if they could misjudge one of their own intimates so badly, what else could they have been wrong about?

It would not stop there. The entire progressive faction would have been weakened, its four most powerful pillars knocked out from underneath it in one fell swoop. The dominant centrists would have been nudged a step or two towards the welcoming arms of the conservatives, undoing centuries of work weakening that faction. Both of those sides would have seen a surge in numbers too, as minor players and individuals with less ideological investment followed the prevailing wind. The overall result would have been a marked trend towards stasis and smug insularism, the very last thing her people, so slow to react at the best of times, needed.

And, ultimately, it would all be an enormous boon for those who actively disliked her, or hated all that she stood for. She was not so foolish as to think that she did not have enemies. It was very difficult to survive over eight hundred years of life without acquiring at least one or two. Her actions would have been treated by them as proof of some hidden and dangerous instability, something they'd suspected all along. They'd point to any even mildly questionable decision she had made over the years and use them to construct a pattern, likely starting with her decision to have a pureblooded daughter.

She sighed. As always, her thoughts came back to Liara.

She opened her eyes and refocused on the datapad, trying a variety of keyword searches related to her daughter against the data. There was remarkably little mention of Liara at all throughout the entire timeline, and even fewer pieces of photographic or vid evidence. Some news footage of Liara and a krogan being pulled out of a pile of rubble on the Citadel following Saren's defeat. A brief and uncomfortable interview, seemingly from not long after, at an awards ceremony. A few tangential mentions of her with regards to a ship called the Normandy and the human Spectre Shepard prior to that vessel's destruction and then... nothing.

It was puzzling, and more than a little bit worrying. Had Liara simply continued with her chosen career, there would have at least been a new article, or perhaps a paper or two over the past four years. The history of dead races might never have captured Benezia's imagination, but she had made a point of reading Liara's work, if only to gain some insight into how her estranged daughter thought and about what; she had some idea of the significance of the rediscovery if Ilos as a result. Certainly Liara, once freed from the Spectre's crew, would have gone straight back and lost herself amid the ruins? Well, perhaps that was it. Such an expedition would attract strict security measures, lest unscrupulous researchers determine the location of the planet and try to plunder its riches.

But... No, that couldn't explain it _all_ away.

Liara said the scars now adorning her body had come from Harbinger. Harbinger had a quite detailed entry to itself, a living ship akin to Sovereign but bigger and thought to be, in some way, the leader of the Reapers. For Liara to have faced the monstrous machine, she must have been part of the military action on and above Earth, for it had sat there since the start of the war. And, even if she overlooked that little detail, the fact remained that the datapad contained extensive biographies on a wide variety of seemingly insignificant people, most evidently written by Liara herself. What did she care of a human called Samantha Traynor, part of the Normandy crew or not? How many times did she need to read about how wonderful the damnable human Spectre was?

"You sleep alright?"

Her head jerked up in surprise to find Aethyta, sitting on the edge of the cot, watching her impassively. When had she woken up?

"Yes. I suppose."

"Nightmares?"

"No."

She had not dreamed at all, such as she could remember. For the first time since she'd boarded Saren's ship, her sleeping hours had contained... emptiness. It was welcome.

"How's your head?"

The ache was constant, but the throbbing had, at least, decreased in frequency. The room no longer swam when she moved. The pain that remained was welcome. A reminder.

"Improving. Thank you."

"Eh, I didn't have anything to do with it," Aethyta said dismissively, and then pointed towards the datapad with her chin. "I see the kid gave you some reading material."

"What? Oh, yes. A... history of the war, of sorts. But I believe it's incomplete."

"Yeah?"

"There's nothing about Liara in here. A few mentions just after I... 'died', and then nothing. It is clear that she put it together for me, but... She avoided my questions too, now that I think of it."

Aethtya sat still for a long moment, evidentially thinking. Then she shrugged in that way that meant she knew more than she was willing to say.

"She's probably working up to it. There's a lot to tell."

"You were involved?"

"For some of it. I... We... Well, it's... complicated."

The inflection to the final word immediately put Benezia on guard.

"How 'complicated'?"

Aethyta's internal debate was lengthier but rather more obvious this time.

"The truth of the matter?" Aethyta sighed eventually. "The kid went right off the deep end for about two years. Set up shop on Nos Astra as an intel broker, of all things. Fell in with some bad people. It was bad enough that the other matriarchs got worried that she was turning into another you. Well, you _after _Saren. At the time I thought it was because you died and then the girlfriend got herself-"

"Girlfriend?"

The word burst from her mouth before she could quite stop it, and the look Aethyta gave her was almost amused. She supposed it would be funny, to an outsider's perspective: war, death and other horrors, her daughter 'going right off the deep end' and she was immediately side-tracked by the possibility that Liara had finally found someone to share her bed? But it was something clean and simple to focus upon, and Benezia always been one to look for good news within bad.

She'd despaired, over the years, of her daughter ever taking a lover. She'd even written to Aethyta about it on more than one occasion, seeking advice. Most maidens had taken at least three or four partners to bed by one hundred, either trying the other species out for fit or simply interested in the novelty of it. Benezia herself had done so in her youth and, while she had not taken a bondmate until Aethyta, she'd nonetheless had a welcome succession of bodies to warm her bed, her heart and her mind, even after her daughter's birth. But Liara had always seemed actively disinterested in pursuing such vital connections.

"Yeah. Your little girl's all grown up despite herself."

"I- Goddess!" She gave herself a moment for the news, and the relief, to sink in. "Did she survive the war? Are they still together? Is it anyone I know? What-"

"I don't think it's my place to spill the beans on that one. The kid can tell you what she wants to when she'd good and ready."

There was a twist to Aethyta's tone at the last that she recognised as bitter, and had a sudden, terrible feeling that they'd inadvertently strayed into territory that she'd desperately wanted to avoid. She had no strength for a confrontation now, whatever she deserved.

"Aethy-" she began.

"Don't you 'Aethy' me, Benezia T'Soni," Aethyta snapped, real fire in her eyes, sudden anger in every line of her body. "You've got no right."

It was a moment before Benezia could find her voice again.

"You're right. I'm sorry."

"You're sorry," Aethyta harrumphed, and glanced down, clearly deliberating. When she looked up again, the anger was still there, but contained, restrained, smouldering. "You should be sorry. You promised me that you'd tell her before she hit one hundred."

"I-"

"You. Promised," Aethyta reiterated in a tone that brooked no further interruptions. "Let her decide if she wanted to meet me or not. But then she turned up in my bar at one hundred and seven with no idea who the fuck I was, and by that stage it was too late for me to do a damned thing about it except pour her a drink and let her walk out the door."

"I left a letter," Benezia said quietly into the sudden, ringing silence. "In the event of my death."

"And a fat lot of good it did!" Aethtya all but spat. "They seized all of your assets and papers as part of the investigation. And since she knew you weren't _really _dead, I'm guessing Liara didn't feel the need to push the issue for access."

"I couldn't have known that would happen!" she protested.

"That's not the point. Goddess! Was it really that hard to say: 'Hey, kid, your other parent's name is Aethyta Argyris and she'd like to meet you one day'?"

"Yes," she whispered, bowing her head. "It should not have been, but it was."

When Aethyta spoke next, her voice was quiet and level, which was somehow far, far worse than the open anger of just seconds before.

"Were you that ashamed of me?"

"What?" Her head jerked back up, eyes seeking out Aethyta's. "No! Never ashamed. Never of you."

Aethyta, though, clearly did not believe her.

"Then why?"

She'd been eight months pregnant when she'd left Aethyta, with another five to go. Pregnancies among matriarchs were not unheard of, especially among ones who'd made the change young like herself, but were certainly uncommon enough to be noteworthy. Some of the physiological changes accompanying the transition from matron made it more difficult, and certainly more uncomfortable, to bear young. She'd been sick almost daily, her days cut short by fatigue as her body struggled with two conflicting sets of hormones and other biological instructions. It had been worth it in the end, of course, but there had certainly been times when she'd wished she'd chosen otherwise.

Conceiving had not been a sensible decision. Aethyta had actually said as much, even if she'd ultimately swallowed her doubts and agreed to be the father. Between her own works and putting out the political fires that her bondmate invariably managed to raise, Benezia had simply had too much going on in her life to have and raise a child. And it had been a new and unneeded source of tension in their relationship, too. The strain had become particularly evident as Benezia's health and patience declined; the arguments and debates that had been the hallmark of their time together had begun, for the first time, to sometimes lose their playful edge.

But it wasn't until that one late night as she lay abed, exhausted but on edge in the wake of yet another argument with her bondmate, that she'd understood the full implications of her decision, and had a moment of stark, horrible clarity: the realisation that their daughter, made in love, would drive them apart. Asari, of all the known sentients, were the most demanding of offspring, slow to mature and dependent upon their mothers for decades. If Benezia was time-poor before the child was born, she would only grow more so deficient once she arrived. Something had to give, and since it could not be the child, it needs must have been either the asari that she loved, or the position amongst her people that she had already sacrificed _so much_ for. Her matron years. Her relationship with her sisters. Her faith.

She'd laid her hand upon her slowly swelling belly then, felt the sleepy stir of the unformed mind within her, and had wept as a secret, dark voice whispered that a young pureblood would have an easier time of it if the father was not there as a constant reminder of her parentage.

She'd never been ashamed of Aethyta. How could she be? Aethyta had passion, intelligence, a wicked sense of humour and a strength that had only made her hidden vulnerabilities all the more endearing. Benezia had been frustrated by her, certainly, annoyed, amused, surprised, charmed and more, but never ashamed. Ashamed of herself, however? Yes. Oh, yes. Especially when she knew all too well what one of her former bondmate's oldest, deepest vulnerabilities was.

She closed her eyes, feeling the tears threaten once more.

"Please," she whispered, "must we do this now?"

There was another long moment before Aethyta answered, her tone almost aggressively reasonable.

"No, I guess we don't. You're not really up to it. I know. But we have to, sooner or later."

"I know."

"Do you. Well, whoopdeedo." Aethyta rolled her eyes and settled back down onto the cot with a rustle of blankets. "You should get some more sleep. You're going to need your strength when we get back to Thessia."

"I know."

"Hmmph."

Benezia switched the datapad back off and lay back herself, trying to get comfortable in a bed designed for a human. And, later, when she dreamed, it was not Saren at her shoulder but Aethyta, whispering beautiful poison into her ear while her homeworld burned and her people screamed in darkness.


	6. Liara (five)

**Five: Liara**

* * *

Her mother gasped. Her father swore. And Liara sat and watched, impassively, as Thessia slowly grew before them until it filled the cockpit's windows. Inwardly, though, she cringed. Every column of smoke that discoloured the once-pristine atmosphere was a mark of her failure, every chunk of debris in orbit a testament to her deficiencies. She should have focused more of her attention on helping her people. Used the resources at her disposal to better browbeat the matriarchs into doing what had been necessary. She'd been stupid and naive to think that they would see reason of their own accord. Even if they were supposed to be wise and knowing and responsible, they were still only asari, and, in their fear and in their pride and in their complacency, they'd betrayed the people they were meant to serve. And she'd let them do it, because she, herself, had been too proud to see her people for what they really were: just people, like any others.

Failure and betrayal. Betrayal and failure. Those were her memories of Thessia now.

"I should have done more," someone said softly, and then she realised it was her.

"You did all you could," Aethyta told her from the co-pilot's chair.

"You don't know that," she replied shortly, feeling her mother's gaze, hot on the back of her neck.

She had told Benezia as little as she dared, evading her questions and outright lying, if largely by omission. It had felt _wrong_- Benezia had always been a sticker for the truth - and it would be harder now that the matriarch was up and about, but her mother seemed fragile. Disorientated enough that Liara didn't want to disturb her equilibrium even further by revealing just how much she'd changed since they had last seen each other. She'd been forced to become a different person, that day on Noveria, and again when Shepard died, and once more when the yahg lay dead at their feet. Four years it had been, since Shepard had rescued her, and she hardly recognised herself.

It would be harder to mask the changes once they had landed, she knew, and impossible once she started putting her plans into motion. She would not fail her people again by letting their leaders go unchallenged when they were clearly wrong. She no longer had the luxury of granting deference to age. But was she wrong for wanting Benezia to think of her as she had been? Even if, had things gone just a little differently, Benezia might well have been one of those same 'leaders' she now despised?

No. That wasn't right. Her mother believed in cooperation with the other species. She would have listened to reason. Liara would have been able to get her on their side. They would have worked together to stop the Reapers.

And yet...

And yet Benezia must have known about the Beacon. She was a matriarch, an important diplomat, an influential politician, a famous theologian and the closest thing Athame had left to a high priestess. There was no way she could _not_ have. Liara could only imagine what would have happened had _she _known about the Beacon in time, all the lives that would have been saved. Benezia was just as complicit in their deaths as the rest of them. Would her mother have continued to conceal it from her, too? Until it was too late? She wished she could be certain that the answer was 'no'.

Another, darker realisation came along with the thought: the beloved stories of the Goddess from her childhood were nothing but lies built upon lies. Benezia had sat Liara in her lap, held her close to her heart and told her that the world was other than it was with the conviction of a true believer. And Liara had believed – not in the Goddess herself, but that _she_ believed.

"Even if you didn't - which I doubt-" Aethyta continued regardless, "I _know_that you did a hell of a lot more than most."

"So did you," she countered, trying to steer the conversation towards safer waters. "I heard that there was talk of a statue after the Citadel."

"You heard wrong," Aethyta replied shortly, scowling. "And don't change the subject. From what _I _heard, you pretty much single-handedly organised the evacuation here."

Edging well out into dangerous territory now, Liara opted to remain silent. But it was not to be.

"You were here, then? When Thessia fell?" Benezia asked.

She'd been _on _Thessia, when the planet fell, had tasted the very moment when hope turned to ash. They'd won in the end, but how many lives would have been saved if they'd just been a bit better prepared? If her agents within Cerberus had managed to survive the purges, or avoid indoctrination? If her mind hadn't been reeling from the implications of the matriarch's deception? If she'd fought just a little bit harder? She heard the desperate pleas and the screams of the dying commandos every night in her nightmares. If only she had _known_.

"Yes. I was here. With the Normandy. It was... horrible," she said, shuddering at the memory. "You should strap yourself in now. The scanners are picking up a lot of debris in the upper atmosphere."

"We haven't been challenged yet," Aethtya noted, a hint of worry in her voice as Benezia settled into the jump seat without another word. The homeworld of their people was- _had_-been one of the most heavily defended in the galaxy. Travel to and from Thessia was strictly controlled, traffic tightly regulated, and the Home Fleet had never had any compunction about using unexpected arrivals as target practice.

"No. From what I can tell, the Home Fleet was completely wiped out."

"But there should be _something_. Automated beacons. Fighters. The orbital platforms."

"Yes. There should."

But there wasn't, not even radio chatter from sector traffic control, and they descended without interference through turbulence of the upper atmosphere and down through the layers of smoke and ash until the great city-state spread out before them, a bleak, unforgiving vista stretching to the horizon. The comm unit crackled with static and silence.

She'd chosen Armali as the point of their return in large part because it was her home. She'd grown up there, played in its parks, run down its laneways, visited its temples, lost herself in its museums. But Armali was also, in many respects, the closest thing Thessia had to a capital, containing within its soaring heights and sprawling confines its largest debating Forum, its greatest legal library, the embassies of the other races and the greatest number of matriarchs per capita of any city within the Republics. Unsurprisingly, given the way the Reapers operated, it had been one of the first places on the planet targeted.

There had been five and a half billion people on Thessia before the war began, and some sixty million of them lived within its greatest city-state. Surveying the devastation now, from the air, Liara would be surprised if a tenth of that number had survived. There wasn't a single building left standing within the city's confines, the bridges collapsed and roadways torn. The once pristine waterways were black with ash and choked with debris; the parks, great and small, little more than glassy craters no longer capable of sustaining life. They flew over impact craters the size of skyball fields and the body of a Reaper destroyer, fallen on its side to crush Ar'Shian Square, where the great statue of Istha T'Rolin had stood.

Of all the monuments in her city, Liara had always loved that statue best. The matron in her flight suit, head tilted towards the sky in wonder, the Parnitha system modelled in her outstretched hand... She had always seemed to embody all that was great about their people: curiosity, serenity, determination and drive. Now that she knew that the plans for the first eezo drive core had likely come, not from Istha's own imagination and skill, but through the Beacon, Liara was glad to see it crushed. Another lie to be absolved.

"I'm getting a nav beacon," Aethyta said abruptly, bringing it up on the screen. "Downtown Nanthris."

The markets. Well, she supposed that made sense. Down by the river for water, open and flat enough to host a large crowd and near several major food distribution warehouses.

"Probably a refugee camp," she acknowledged, bringing the freighter around.

It _was_ a refugee camp, smaller than she would have liked and, when viewed from above, little more than a disorganised huddle of tents and emergency shelters crouched against the banks of the sadly polluted river. Some work had been done towards building defensive walls; to Liara's now practiced eye, it was a mediocre job at best, cobbled together from rubble, storage containers and a few pieces of portable wall likely liberated from fortifications elsewhere. She couldn't spot anyone manning the battlements as they came in, low, but a gaggle of young children ran out from one of the studier shelters, pointing excitedly up towards them. The group was quickly shepherded back to relative safety by a couple of older girls, and moments later a pair of asari in commando leathers appeared, moving purposefully.

The camp wasn't much to look at, certainly, but it would be a place to start. She had to start _somewhere_. And, if not here, there would certainly be other places that needed help.

Liara picked out an open spot on the downstream end of the camp, behind what little protection the walls offered, and carefully brought the freighter down, killing the engines once settled. She undid her point harness and made her way out of the cabin and to her locker in the cargo bay, leaving her parents to follow after. She retrieved her gauntlets there, and drew and clipped them on, wincing as the right rubbed against the still-tender skin of that hand. The fit was imperfect now, tight in places and loose - or empty - in others, and the gauntlet itself stiffly new.

She tried not to think about it, and avoided her gaze in the locker's mirror.

Her weapons came out next, to be drawn, checked and holstered. First, from the rack, came the Tempest that had been the first gun she'd ever bought for herself, back on Nos Astra; it was an old, reliable friend, modded to increase accuracy and clip size. Next, from its case, she drew the Paladin Shepard had 'borrowed' for her from Spectre supplies.

She stared down at the pistol in silence. Goddess, Shepard was never very far from her thoughts. If she closed her eye she could see the human standing before her, the gun and its case in her hands, that silly, lopsided, perfect smile on her face. Liara had laughed even as she accepted it, because she knew that this was her lover's idea of a romantic gift (where other beings gave sweet treats or pretty flora, Shepard gave _ammunition mods_), and then the two of them had gone down to the cargo bay to test it out. Testing had led to competing, and Liara had quickly achieved a lead that seemed comfortable until she realised that Shepard had been deliberately throwing the match. Liara had told her, all mock indignation, that such tactics might well work on a certain turian of their acquaintance but wouldn't on her, and Shepard had asked her then, in that low, sultry voice, her eyes dark and alive in a way that made Liara's breath catch, what _would _work and then-

"Overkill much?"

Liara shrugged and closed the locker, clipping the gun into its holster at her waist beside her grenades, along with the spare clips and medigel pouch.

"I doubt that we will encounter trouble, but the humans have a saying: it's better to be safe than sorry." She looked past Aethyta in her own light armour to Benezia, not quite able to stop a frown of concern when she noted that her mother was almost hugging herself, expression uncertain as she eyed her daughter's armaments. "Are you ready?"

"No," Benezia admitted with a tight smile that was painful to see. "But I believe there is little choice in the matter."

They'd discussed it at length, the three of them. Or, rather, Liara had explained her reasoning until the other two had been forced to agree that there was no point in hiding Benezia's return.

Oh, Liara had _considered _it. Benezia looked a pale shadow of herself, and they could alter her markings and do one or two other little tricks that would draw out those differences enough to let her hide in plain sight. But, if information brokering had taught Liara one thing, it was what secrets never stayed secret for long. If they tried to conceal Benezia any longer than absolutely necessary, the implication, when the truth was inevitably revealed, would be that they thought they'd done something wrong.

"I'm sorry it has to be so soon," she said, honestly. "I would have waited until you were feeling better of I could have, but..."

"As you say," Benezia said, and turned away.

Liara caught Aethyta's eye then; the matriarch's shoulders lifted in the slightest of shrugs as she prepped and holstered her own shotgun. There was real tension between the older two asari now, and Liara wondered, not for the first time, if involving Aethyta in this was a good idea. But who else could she turn to? It would have been unfair to expect anyone aboard the Normandy to come with her to Thessia when their own homes were in ruins, and she'd not heard from Shiala since Rannoch.

Liara suppressed a sigh, straightened up, and led the way through to the airlock, hesitating only a moment before keying in the sequence to open it.

The smell hit her first as the outer door hissed open, a scent of mingled ash, death and decay that was all-too familiar from Earth. Cool damp air was next, cold enough across her face and neck that she almost shivered. Far too cold for an Armali summer, she knew. And it was strangely, unnaturally quiet, the aural landscape devoid of even birdsong or insect noise. The only sounds she could hear were the wind, a distant clatter of falling stone and the sluggish churn of the river.

One of the commandos she had spotted during their descent was waiting for them outside the hatch, rifle at the ready. Elsewise, the camp appeared all but deserted. Over the other asari's shoulder, though, Liara spotted the other huntress, having taken up position atop an emergency shelter with her sniper rifle.

She found herself surprised by the lack of a welcoming party. There was almost no relief effort on Thessia; where the other species had hierarchical systems of governance to direct the flow of aid, the Republics, with their sprawling, technology-dependant democracy, were floundering, the various colonies and outposts too shocked and too busy trying to tend to their own populaces to worry about faceless figures on the homeworld. Surely those here would welcome anyone who might be bringing supplies? Or had they faced raiders or pirates, or others of that ilk to make them wary of newcomers?

The thought of such filth setting foot, unchallenged, in the city of her childhood made her blood run hot. But there was no denying that it was a possibility, now. With the Home Fleet gone, and the others scattered, Thessia was all but undefended. The major merc companies might be under Aria T'Loak's thumb, but there were always a hundred other bands, many of them opportunistic cowards who'd sat out the war, and Thessia, even devastated, was a rich planet.

The commando before Liara was shockingly young, barely old enough to don the leathers if she was any judge, filthy and clearly on the verge of exhaustion. Her eyes, though, were hard, her face wary, and she carried herself like the gun was an extension of her body. She opened her mouth, in challenge or in greeting Liara couldn't say, but froze, the words dying upon her lips and her gun falling to her side when Liara stepped out fully, into the wan sun of her homeworld. The wariness melted into a look Liara had seen before, if usually directed Shepard:

Awe.


	7. Liara (six)

**Six: Liara**

* * *

"Wait, you're-" the girl began.

"Yes?"

"You're Liara T'Soni, aren't you? You were with Commander Shepard on the Normandy and-"

"Yes," Liara said smoothly, torn between relief and disappointment but masking it with a smile.

On one hand, her newfound fame would certainly make the task ahead of her easier. If people thought her a hero, experience suggested that they would be more inclined to listen to what she had to say. On the other, part of her had rather hoped that her supposed celebrity was not so well entrenched amongst her people. Her time as the Broker had only served to reinforce her natural disposition towards the limelight and shunning thereof; being known, a face recognisable galaxy-wide, was dangerous and deeply uncomfortable besides. The attention had been bad enough on Earth, those few days.

"I am. And you are..?"

"Aurelia Vamos," the youth said, drawing herself up and saluting in the southern style, her open hand flat over her heart. "I was part of Matriarch Eachannythis' retinue. I - Goddess! It's an honour, Lady T'Soni."

It took a moment for Liara to realise that the compliment and honorific was directed towards her. She had to force herself not to turn around. There had only ever been one Lady T'Soni while Liara had been alive.

"'Lady T'Soni' is my mother," she corrected gently but firmly. "'Doctor' will suffice for me."

She saw the flicker of a question pass across the commando's face, and then her gaze fell over Liara's shoulder. The rifle snapped back up, the young asari falling back into a defensive stance.

"Wait, that's-"

"My mother," Liara said, quickly moving to position herself between the two, turning her head slightly so she could keep the sniper's nest in view. She was still trying to get used to having half of her normal field of vision. She heard movement behind her, and knew that Aethyta was bringing her own gun up, making the suddenly tense scene worse.

"But she-"

"She was in stasis, during the war," she said quickly. "She was indoctrinated. Do you know what that is?"

"I've heard rumours," Aurelia said, glancing between mother and daughter uncertainly. "Some kind of mind-control..?"

"Yes. Exactly. The Reapers targeted the leaders of the major races and tried to brainwash them into betraying their own people. That's why the Batarian Hegemony fell so quickly. My mother's crimes were not her own, and we have nothing to fear from her now." Or so Liara devoutly hoped. She reached out, then, and laid her hand atop the rifle's muzzle, exerting a gentle downwards pressure. "Please. If you cannot trust her, trust me."

After a long moment, Aurelia let the gun drop, then abruptly holstered it behind her back. Liara felt a surge of relief wash through her: the first hurdle cleared.

"Sorry, my La- I mean, Doctor. It's just-"

"It is quite understandable."

She favoured the commando with another smile, and only then did she dare a glance over her own shoulder at her parents. Aethyta was watching her with a hint of approval but Benezia...

Liara looked away quickly, not quite ready to face what she saw there.

Aurelia led them through the camp, quickly joined by her slightly older partner Griete, explaining the situation as they went. Liara interrupted periodically to ask questions or clarify matters, as did her father; Benezia, though, remained uncharacteristically silent, head bowed whenever the commandos snuck suspicious glances back at her.

Aurelia and Griete were all that remained of the household guards of two different matriarchs. The pair had met in the ancient, disused sewers below Armali's winding, paved streets, each directed by their Lady to get their household's children to safety. The bombardment and invasion of Thessia, for them, had passed mostly in darkness, the children barricaded in some forgotten cellar while they took turns to raid and scavenge above ground for supplies. Sometimes they encountered other survivors and were able to lead them to safety. At others, they were not.

By the time Reapers had finally fallen, their bedraggled group had numbered almost fifty. The two commandos had been joined by a third, and a matron who'd run with a merc company in her maiden days. Twenty-three children under thirty, including toddlers and an infant still at her terrified mother's breast, a dozen more girls progressing towards maturity and a handful of civilian adults, mainly matrons. When they'd emerged from the safety of their hiding place, they'd joined other shocked survivors in making their way towards the markets, where Matriarch Efrosyni and her half-dozen surviving followers had begun to organise a camp.

Liara recognised the name as a figure from her childhood, one of a group of politically powerful asari her mother had always seemed to find time for, sometimes at Liara's expense. Benezia recognised it too; Liara heard her sharp inhalation of breath.

But Efrosyni had been wounded at some point during the final days of the defence, and, sickened from the subsequent infection, now lay on her deathbed. Without her wisdom to guide them into decisive action, the adults of the camp, skewed wildly young in any event, were locked in debate, trying and failing to build a consensus on how best to proceed without her. The division of opinion was threatening to splinter the camp and Liara reflected, not for the first time, that the perpetual plebiscite that was the asari political process was as terrible at responding quickly and rationally to crises.

This flaw in their governance had been recognised, long ago and by wiser heads than Liara's, and systems put into place to account for it, but never had a disaster of this magnitude even been contemplated. The police and other emergency responders had been all but wiped out in the initial bombardments and invasion waves, the High Command that oversaw their shattered military decimated, scattered around the surviving colonies, and the matriarchs that kept their people's wisdom and the knowledge of their laws alive were all missing or dead- or worse.

The Reapers were efficient killers. Liara would give them that. And they'd seemed more interested in killing her people outright than gathering them up for processing, like they did to the other races. One day, perhaps, she'd have time to investigate the discrepancy.

When they reached the largest of the emergency shelters, pulling double-duty as a dining hall and debating forum, she was stopped from entering by a hand on her arm.

"I would speak with Efrosyni," Benezia said as she turned back. "She is my friend of old. Please."

There was concern, in her mother's eyes, for her friend, but there, too, behind it, something dark and fearful as they flicked towards the shelter and its audible hubbub. Liara found herself suddenly reminded of all of the engagements and parties and functions she'd been dragged along to in her youth. Hundreds of mornings, afternoons and evenings spent in misery, wishing she were somewhere, _anywhere_else, hiding in corners and out-of-the-way places, alone but for the nervous flutter of her heart in her chest, the wretched stammering of her own voice and the certain knowledge that she would never be as beautiful or as elegant or as intelligent as the asari who moved gracefully through the throng, laughing with melodic voices and flirting with light hands and swaying hips.

Liara let her own gaze flick over to Aethyta, who saw the question in her eye and shrugged.

"Eh, I probably wouldn't be able to resist kicking their heads in anyway." She nodded to Griete. "Alright babe, lead the way."

When her parents were gone, Liara sighed. It would be easier, without them watching, to be the person she'd become, but the irony of the situation was not lost on her. She, who had shunned the political sphere, seeking it out. Her mother, who'd lived for it, fleeing in apparent fear.

"Lady?" Aurelia prompted when she didn't move.

"Doctor," she corrected absently, still frowning at the door. She had always promised herself that she would never be like her mother. And yet, here she was, about to do an incredibly Benezia-like thing, albeit in a Liara-like way. Or so she hoped.

She opened the door, stepped through it to stand at parade-ground rest at the back of the crowd, and waited until silence, in dribs and spurts, fell, heads turning. Only when she had the full, undivided attention of every person in the room did she speak, her voice cool and calm and deadly quiet:

"What is going on here?"


	8. Benezia (seven)

**Seven: Benezia  
**

* * *

It was past dark when Benezia emerged from the two conjoined shelters serving as a home to the wounded and ill of the camp.

She hugged herself tightly, eyes closed, breath fogging in the cold night air as she tilted her head up towards the cloudy, smoke-laden sky. It had rained earlier; the droplets were acid. She felt drained and hollow, as though a black well had swallowed up everything she had once been, leaving only shame and anguish and a terrible, leaden feeling of fatigue deep within her bones. An ache in her heart to match the pain in her head.

Rosi would die tonight. Benezia had seen enough of sickness and death in her lifetime, even within the bounds of the Republics, to know this to be true. Her friend of some four hundred years, killed by the monsters she herself had worked so hard to bring back into the galaxy. The universe would be a lesser place without her quick, dry wit and sometimes wild fancies. If Benezia could have gone in her stead, she would have.

In her fever and through her pain, Rosi had thought her a ghost. Benezia had felt it best not to correct her, even when her friend had raged at her for betraying them, or begged absolution for sending her to her death. Instead, she'd held her hand and sponged her forehead and offered what little comfort she could while Rosi's surviving students watched with barely concealed contempt and loathing. Aethyta's scowling presence had kept them at bay, though, until she could bear to sit no longer.

_Saren's talons grasped her shoulders and he shook her viciously, opening old wounds and causing new._

_"You fool! You idiot! I thought you understood how important this is!" he roared. She tried to twist away; this only served to anger him further. The backhanded blow caught her across the side of her face, drawing no blood but leaving her slightly staggered._

_"I'm sorry!" she stammered, mind reeling from his anger and the blow. "I thought-"_

_"You thought? You THOUGHT!?"_

_Another blow, and then his hand was around her throat, crushingly tight, the tips of his talons digging into the sensitive folds at the back of her neck, lifting her clean off her feet. She froze, breath caught in her chest, not daring to move lest he do more damage there. Her wide eyes locked onto his wild ones._

_He dropped her then, staggering backwards and turning away, his hand across his eyes, strangely hunched in on himself._

_"Get out of my sight," he growled, not looking at her._

_Part of her wanted no more than to flee entirely, to take her retinue and return to her home and do what she could to further their cause from there. Another part of her wanted to go to him, to soothe away the angry tremors that wracked his frame. But the rest of her counselled patience. To stay. To keep working. To regain his trust._

_He was right, after all. She'd overstepped her bounds by interpreting his orders for herself rather than following them to the letter, and so she had failed him. She did not deserve to be in his presence. She would find a way rectify her mistake, pacify his anger, and then she could return to him. She must. She would be obedient. She would-_

"Hey-"

She jerked away so violently from the touch that she stumbled and fell, hard, to her hands and knees. The shock of the impact rippled up through her body, jolting her back to some semblance of sense. She was on Thessia. Saren was dead. His ship destroyed. The hand upon her shoulder, the voice at her ear, Aethyta's.

Her head began to pound again. She gritted her teeth against it.

"Whoa whoa whoa - what just happened there?

When she opened her eyes again, Aethyta was kneeling before her, all concern.

"You alright?"Aethtya prompted when she didn't respond.

"Goddess, Aethtya, what do you think?" she snapped, finding her voice. She pushed herself up to her knees, one, damp, muddy hand covering her face, and breathed deeply, trying to calm her racing heart. Aethyta did not deserve such anger, she knew, but part of her, coming from the black pit, wanted to lash out and cause more pain. "I- I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I-"

"It's ok."

Benezia's hand fell to her neck. Goddess, she could still feel Saren's hands around her throat, his talons pricking her skin. But it was a memory. Just a memory.

She didn't realise that she'd said the words aloud until she heard Aethyta's 'ah' of understanding.

"Wanna tell me about it?"

"Not particularly."

"Benezia-"Aethyta's tone was gentle, but there was a note of warning in it all the same, and Benezia remembered Liara's words on the night she had been awakened. They did not trust her. They were right not to.

"Saren struck me," she said hearing the shudder in her own voice. "I had displeased him. He was… I… All I wanted was to return to his good graces."

She took another deep breath, closed her eyes again and tried to force the memory and the way it made her skin crawl from her mind. She needed to focus on the here and the now. The earth under her. The sky above. The smell of rain and ash. The breath in her lungs, the energy of her body, the beating of her heart. Slow. Still. Calm.

Aethyta's 'hmm' as she stood back up was considered, but she said nothing other than: "Need a hand?"

She was trembling again, she realised.

"Please."

Aethyta helped her gently to her feet and stepped back, watching her, still concerned. Benezia shivered, not just from the wind as it picked up, and hugged herself again.

"'should probably get some warmer clothes. Shouldn't be this cold, this time of year."

"No. It should not."

Aethyta wet her lips, and glanced back at the medical block.

"For what it's worth, I'm sorry about Rosi."

"You never liked her," she remembered. She and Aethyta had always had wildly different social circles with little overlap.

"I never liked most of your friends," Aethyta shrugged. "And the feeling was mutual from what I could tell. But she deserves another couple hundred years of being a sardonic pain in the ass."

"She does," Benezia agreed. "More so than I."

"Hey, none of that," her former bondmate began, only to stop abruptly as an inasari scream echoed across the compound. "Aw, shit."

"What was that?"

"Banshee," Aethyta supplied the unfamiliar word, unlimbering her shotgun as the scream rose again, joined by a second. "Tacka-Yakshi. What happens when the Reapers process an asari."

It took a moment for Benezia to work out the translation and remember the associated myth. When she did, she shuddered anew. The ancient tribes of the Iaonna Plains had believed that the unmourned dead came back to life as a curse upon the living, a vengeful demon who stole, not life itself, but the things _of_life. It was the soul-taker. The mind-stealer. The thief of dreams.

"Goddess protect us."

By then Aethyta was running in the direction of the noise; she trailed after on unsteady feet, buffeted occasionally by people fleeing in the opposite direction. There was shouting ahead and more of those horrible screams, answered by the measured _crack_ of sniper fire. She forced herself to pick up the pace, and reached the wall just as Aethyta finished scrambling up the ladder to the battlement. Benezia hesitated for a moment, then followed. Weak as she was and with such difficulty concentrating as she had, she would have little to offer in any battle, but she felt, at least, that she should _see_what the monsters had turned her people into.

There were six asari atop the crude battlement when she reached it, including Aethyta and Liara. She recognised two of the commandos as Aurelia and Griete, their escort of earlier; the other two, also in the leathers, were strangers to her. None of them paid her any mind beyond an initial glance. It was at once a relief and a new source of discomfort that there seemed to be no expectation that she contribute to the discussion.

"This happens every night?" Liara was saying as she stared down a spotter's scope. Benezia followed her gaze out into the darkness. There were half a dozen glowing blue shapes moving out there among the ruined buildings beyond the killing zone, and another five upon it. Periodically, one of them would vanish behind some unseen obstacle, or surge forward in a series of blindly-fast hops that she eventually recognised as biotic charges. Less frequently, one of them would wink out entirely, evidently felled.

"Yes, Lady. Doctor. Sometimes it's more," Aurelia said, lining up and taking another shot. "Sometimes it's less."

"Had one of them get into the compound three nights ago," one of the unknown commandos, a matron with turquoise crest banding, added in a matter-of-fact tone. "Killed five people before we could put it down. Nasty business."

"We won't let that happen again," Liara said firmly, passing the scope to Aethyta without taking her eye from the scene before her. Her hand came down to rest upon the pistol at her hip. "Do they come during the day?"

"Not in such numbers. Lone wanders, mainly. Sometimes we run into them while scouting and try to lead them away. They're hard to shake. Harder to kill."

"I wonder what's drawing 'em here now then?" Aethyta mused. Out in the darkness, another glowing shape fell with a scream of rage. "The light? The noise?"

"We wondered about that. Dora wanted to set up an outpost up river with some floodlights and sound system to see if it'd draw them off, but we don't have the resources."

"We do now, and it's certainly worth a try," Liara agreed absently. "Also, there are some sentry turrets in the freighter we can set up around the perimeter. But, in truth, I am more interested in why they're not attacking each other. The ones on Earth went mad when the Reapers fell and started attacking everything in sight, without discrimination. I was told the same was true on Palaven."

"Troop composition, maybe?" Aethtya suggested. "I'm not seeing any husks or marauders, and that's mainly what you got on Earth. Palaven too."

"Perhaps."

"Anyway, save the speculation for tomorrow," Aethyta said, lowering the scope finally and turning back to the commandos, none of whom looked up from their work. "Unless you've got another couple of sniper rifles hidden in that armour of yours, we're not going to be able to stop them all before they reach the wall."

"We set up some deadfalls and other traps they've still got to get through, but we ran out of proximity mines four days ago, so you might be right," Griete said, popping her red-hot thermal clip and slamming in a new one in a single, smooth motion. As she did so, another series of bone-chilling screams rose from the glowing creatures, and the commando shuddered. "Goddess, I _hate_ those things."

"Don't hate them," Liara said evenly. "They didn't have any say in what they became. Pity them, and grant them the mercy of a swift end."

Liara had not looked at her once throughout the entire conversation, and now ducked her head to confer further with one of the unnamed commandos. Aethyta, though, did.

"You shouldn't be up here," Aethyta said, almost gently. Benezia could not say how she appeared to her former bondmate, tired and muddied and heartsick as she was. "Go back to the freighter. Get your head down. The kid and I will handle this."

She shook her head, trying not to wince at the renewed throbbing in her temples the motion generated.

"No. I would see what I have wrought."

"Benezia-"

"Aethyta, let me see. Please"

"It ain't pretty," Aethyta warned her with a frown, but handed over the scope anyway.

"I was not expecting it to be," she replied.

It wasn't, but she forced herself to not look away. This was the end she had worked towards, given flesh and form. If she and Saren had been certain that the price of pride in the face of Sovereign's kind was death, then they had ignored the cost of surrender: ruin.

The creatures had been asari, once, in the same way that the things on New Eden had been human before Saren's arrival. That much was evident. But, like those humans, these had become twisted, diseased caricatures of asari. Heavy-breasted, swollen-bellied and dead-eyed, their grey, cracking skin was drawn tight over distorted bone and cartilage and corded muscle, studded with tubes and lights, wounds from around which black ichor oozed and crusted.

And yet...

And yet there was a strange kind of beauty to them. She could see more and more of it, the longer she looked. They _crackled _with power, even at this distance, biotic barriers shrugging off volley after volley of fire. The underlying structures of the asari body were laid bare for all to see, delicate and deceptively strong. And there was life, there, in those bodies, where there otherwise might have been only death. Surely continued existence was preferable to utter oblivion?

The creature she watched threw back its head and screamed, a wordless cry of unimaginable torment that the others quickly took up. Her head resonated with the noise of it, her vision starting to swim.

_These were not her thoughts_. Goddess! This was not her voice. Death would be preferable to the twilight existence of such things, neither dead nor alive, and she suddenly knew why they were drawn to the camp: it _was _the light. They sought release, relief in the arms of the Goddess. Athame taught that they would all go peacefully into the light, peacefully, when the time came.

The scope clattered away as she pressed both hands to her temples, her legs buckling beneath her as she fell to her knees for the second time in that evening. For the second time that evening, too, Aethyta was suddenly kneeling before her.

"Shit, Nezzie, this is not the time," Aethyta said. She started to reach out to touch her, then stopped, drawing her hands carefully back, palms up. "I told you to go back. You're not ready for this."

The pressure inside Benezia's head was building again, sharply, inexorably, until she thought she might explode from it. Stars danced before her eyes, her teeth ground together, jaw clenched. Through it, though, she managed to reach out, grabbing a fistful of Aethyta's jacket with one hand.

"Kill them," she managed to whisper as their eyes met. "Quickly. Give them peace."

And then, to her relief, the small mercy and blackness of sleep reached out and claimed her once again.


	9. Liara (eight)

_a/n the first: ah, I almost forgot! The lovely and talented soulfate4-2 drew and coloured a scene from this chapter. It's over at fav .me /d5906vr  
a/n the second: if you're partial to femshep/liara and haven't yet found Midnight Lion's _Pressure_, you are missing out. Go there, now!  
_

**Eight: Liara  
**

* * *

Liara turned at the sound of Aethyta's cursing just in time to see her catch Benezia as she went down, momentarily distracted from the ranged battle that was rapidly threatening to become a close-quarters one.

"-goddess-damned stubborn fucking-"

"What happened?" she asked, stepping smartly over and bending to assist. Her mother was out cold, a smear of dirt across her brow and a trickle of blood running from her nose. Her breathing was shallow and her pulse, when Liara took it, fast.

"How the hell would I know? One minute she's fine, the next she's spouting gibberish and then this. Had some sort of a flashback thing not five minutes ago. I told her to go back to the freighter and lie down, but _no_, she just _had _to see. Stubborn bitch. I swear, she's worse than you are!"

Liara was fairly certain that her father could out-stubborn both herself and her mother if she put her mind do it, and elected to remain silent on that one. Instead, she helped manoeuvre her mother into a recovery position and then glanced back over the makeshift parapet. Another banshee had been felled in the interim, but the remaining six would be upon them soon, and only one had taken substantial damage. She cursed inwardly.

"I knew this was a bad idea," Aethyta continued to grouse, glancing back over the wall herself. "Thawing her out. Bringing her here. You could have waited another year or more, until things were better. We're not going to have the time to constantly babysit, and I don't think that all of this," she gestured beyond the wall, "is going to do any wonders for her mental state."

Liara's blood ran cold as the words registered, accompanied by a pang of sudden guilt. She'd always told herself that she'd awaken her mother once the war was over, in much the same way she'd once promised that she'd recover Shepard's body, bring down the Shadow Broker. But she'd never thought to question the wisdom of the exact _timing _of bringing Benezia out of stasis. The war was over. The Reapers were dead. That meant she could finally have her mother back. But, for Benezia, seeing all of this - goddess, it'd almost be like forcing Shepard to relive the Blitz.

Stupid, stupid, selfish, short-sighted - all the things Liara could not afford to be. And, worse, it was too late, now, to put her mother back.

"Well, I wish you'd said so at the time," she said shortly, drawing her pistol and moving into position along the parapet.

"I did, remember?"

"No, you _wondered _if it was." Two of the banshees were within range now; she checked which of the pair the commandos had flagged and opened fire upon it. "And then not for those reasons."

Aethyta rolled her eyes and cracked her knuckles.

"Well, excuse me if I was still trying to get over the fact that, you know, she _wasn't actually dead_ and didn't have time to consider the full implications of the situation."

"Can we please argue about this later? I cannot help but feel that a battlefield is not the place for a family dispute."

On a battlefield with an _audience_, no less, she added within the privacy of her own head. Hopefully Aurelia and the rest would be too fixated on the battle to pay them any mind, but she doubted it. Commandos, as a general rule, were possessed of very high levels of situational awareness.

"Shows what you know," Aethyta snorted, and then she was gone, jumping lightly over the wall with a flash of biotic energy.

Liara had never seen an asari fight like Aethyta did. Asari combat doctrine almost universally called for classic hit and run tactics, combatants relying on speed, mobility and keeping a very respectful distance between themselves and any enemy. It was a doctrine Liara herself subscribed to when she couldn't rely on the superior doctrine of overwhelming force.

Aethyta, though, was a brawler, like Vega, or Shepard on a bad day or, yes, Urdnot Wrex. The matriarch threw a powerful warp at her target with a lazy backhand, charged into it with an explosion of biotic force that lit up the killing ground like a lighting strike, ducked a wild swipe from its taloned hands, followed _that_up with a series of shotgun blasts to its face at point-blank range, and, while it struggled to recover from the assault, barriers down, stove in what remained of its head with the butt of her shotgun in a brutal, two-handed swing.

It was a picture of pure, savage efficiency, not a single, wasted movement in the entire sequence. At the end of it, Aethyta stood above the dead banshee's body, panting slightly as she waited for her gun to cool enough to be fired again. Then she picked out her next target and started to repeat the sequence.

Liara stared at the spectacle, open-mouthed and a little bit awestruck, before remembering where she was and realising that Aethyta was now out in the middle of the killing zone, alone, with the four remaining banshees bearing down on her, charging forward in fits and spurts. The sound of their screams filled the night air once more.

She cursed and vaulted the parapet herself, using her biotics to slow her fall, and hit the ground running. While Aethyta looked to be able to handle the creatures on a one-to-one basis, two at once gave even Shepard trouble and three or four to one would certainly be lethal. She needed someone to draw the extras off, so they could be dealt with, one at a time.

Divide and conquer. Another classic asari strategy.

It was only when Liara had managed, via means of a clumsily-thrown grenade, to attract the attention of the unengaged banshee nearest to her father that it dawned on her that this, too, was an incredibly stupid thing to have done. The blasted creatures had always seemed to be immune to her singularities and stasis fields, meaning that two of her three most powerful biotic attacks were all but useless. More than that, she was tired, out of shape following her two weeks of recovery and inactivity, couldn't hold a gun properly in her right hand and, yes, was missing half her field of vision and part of her depth perception.

Stupid stupid _stupid_. She'd have to get back into her fitness and training regime starting tomorrow - she could probably attach herself to the commandos' own sessions, if they had them - and work at doing everything left-handed. For now, though, she had little option but to see this course of action through. One thing that she'd learned from Shepard was that people wanted confidence and decisiveness in their leaders. You listened to any advice offered or requested, made your decisions and then made them work. She couldn't back down here, not with an audience. She had a reputation, now, and respect, once earned, had to be maintained. It wouldn't do for a 'hero' from the Normandy to retreat without properly engaging the foe.

She swapped out for her Tempest and opened fire as the banshee tried to close on her, catching it in her a warp field of her own, which she detonated with a clumsy throw. She dropped a grenade at her feet as it recovered and charged at her, covering the distance between them with unsettling speed. Liara dove away at the last instant, behind the ruined remains of a wall, felt the explosion and heard the scream, and knew that she'd timed it right. Rising, dodging, she emptied two clips into the thing before it fell, aided by a barrage from the compound's walls.

Two down...

Liara looked around wildly until she spotted the remaining two monsters. Aethyta was tangling with one - its barriers were down, but it seemed to be happy to take altogether too much punishment, and the matriarch, staying just out of reach of those dangerous arms, was visibly starting to tire. The other creature, despite being continually peppered with sniper fire, was making its way inexorably towards her, coming in from behind.

"Aeythta!" she shouted out in warning.

The matriarch glanced back over her shoulder, spotted the flanker and swore loudly enough to be heard clear across the battlefield. She dodged away from the first banshee, angling back towards the camp, but tripped, stumbled, went down, the gun flying out of her hand. The monster she'd been battling, thankfully, fell seconds after, taken through the skull and throat by snipers' rounds, but the second banshee, leaving bright blue after-images as it charged, would be upon her in seconds. Aethyta seemed to realise this too, fumbling at her side for her shotgun, backing away on her elbows, even as Liara started to run towards them, quickly picking up pace despite the uneven ground.

Liara was not quite sure where the idea came from – certainly not the rational part of her mind - but it went straight from her brain to her body in an instant. She ducked her head, set her shoulder and ran in towards it, quick as she could, like a farliner dashing for the scoring platform in skyball. Her charge took it in the side just as it reached her father.

It was altogether too much like running into an electrified wall, and she rebounded off of it, hard, tumbling to one side, her arm numb from the shoulder down. But the banshee was knocked off balance too, enough for Aethyta to regain her feet and dance away, gun in hand. Between the two of them circling it and the snipers on the walls, it was finally felled moments later.

"I swear, this is fucking harder work than it used to be," Aethyta puffed when it was over, wiping blood from her cheek. She caught Liara's eye and nodded with apparent approval. "Nice job, kid. We'll make a krogan of you yet! Still, remind me to show you how to do the charge thing properly. Keep doing it that way and all you'll do is break your damn fool neck. You've got to use your biotics-"

Later – and it was much later - after they'd conferred and celebrated with the commandos, after they'd put Benezia safely to bed, after they'd found and deployed the auto turrets, after she'd wiped herself clean of some of the filth of the battle and stripped herself of her armour, after she'd treated the burns and changed dressings as Karin had directed… After all that, she'd all but fallen flat into her cot, wedged between two stacks of cargo containers. Sleep though, would not come. Her body might have been exhausted, but her head was full of the things she had to do in the morning.

She had to reorganise the camp, for one, to make it more manageable. She had some ideas in that respect, at least, modified versions the ancient tribal villages she'd studied in the third year of her undergraduate. She needed to see about bulking up the camp's defences, too. The layout changes and turrets would help. And, while almost all of the camp's occupants appeared to be civilians, she could probably find the bodies necessary – with some browbeating and a bit of training - to give the commandos a break from watch.

But for proper security, to do the cleanout work required to clear this patch of Thessia and beyond, she needed more able-bodied fighters. They were in desperately short supply. Perhaps she could ask Wrex for a favour..? Surely there were still krogan out there whose lust for battle hadn't been entirely sated by the war. But she'd need to get the comm buoys modified and deployed and tied into the mass relay before she could call out of the system. Could that be done tomorrow? Possibly. Damn the Reapers. They'd even managed to take out all of the _redundant _communications infrastructure. And then, behind all of that, there was the issue of food. The camp's population, with proper rationing, could probably last a month or two just off of the supplies she'd brought, but they'd need to find a long-term source of sustenance. Perhaps-

When she finally drifted off into an exhausted sleep, Shepard was there, waiting for her, gloriously naked, bathed in the soft blue light of her quarters on the Normandy. She sat on the bed beside Liara, smiled at her with that perfect, crooked smile, eyes dark and dancing.

"I'm always coming back," Shepard whispered as she caressed her cheek, leaned forward to bring their lips together. The words were soft and warm and full of hope, underlain by steely determination, exactly like Shepard herself. "I promise."

But the moment their lips touched, Shepard burst into a thousand tendrils of black and red mist, tendrils that slipped through Liara's desperately reaching fingers, that faded away into nothing in the space it took to breathe, leaving her to weep, broken and alone.


	10. Aethyta (nine)

**A/N: **Thank you all so much for your comments and favourites. I continue to be blown away by the level of interest this little story has received. And also a very big thanks, as always, to the wonderful jt-boi for pulling beta duty.

* * *

**Nine: Aethyta**

It was seven days later, and the camp was a different place. Liara had... Well, truth be told, Aethyta still didn't know exactly what the kid had said or done in the meeting hall after they'd landed, but it had been damned effective. She'd smoothly stepped into the gap Efrosyni had left with her passing, and the camp, in turn, hadn't known what hit it.

They had an abundance of clean water now that they didn't have to boil and filter first, courtesy of a pair of purifying units taken from the freighter's cargo hold. There was even enough of the stuff that there was talk of setting up a bathing block, an idea met with what Aethyta would charitably call 'delighted squeals'. Truth be told, she'd kill for a decent shower herself or - oh, and now that was a heavenly thought - a long, hot, relaxing bath, with a good vid and bottle of red and lots and lots of suds, and maybe even someone to rub her back and shoulders. She ached at the end of most days, the unnatural cold of the false winter seeming to linger in her bones. Old age: the ultimate kick in the quad.

They had food, too, enough to fill everyone's bellies in the short term, even if it did come mainly in the form of MREs from their ship and non-perishables pulled from demolished shops and warehouses, and the ruins of nearby homes. Communications-wise, a tenuous link to the outside galaxy had been established, though it was limited to low-bandwidth transmissions, sent and received in a burst two or three times a day, whenever anyone activated the mass relay. A tenuous link, too, had been established with the other three refugee camps they'd located within the city limits so far. Liara had already convinced one of the groups to amalgamate with theirs, and expected that the other two would soon follow suit. She'd reasoned - and Aethyta had agreed - that the overall benefits provided by the population increase, particularly in terms of able bodies and diversity of skill sets, would more than offset any problems it caused.

Under the kid's direction, work parties had almost finished rearranging the camp into a series of loosely-spaced rings, the outermost and innermost heavily fortified. It was an oddly reassuring layout, one that had seemed familiar in a way that Aethyta hadn't quite been able to place, until Liara had shown, with a few quick sketches on her datapad, how the oldest cities on the planet had evolved from ancient villages laid out in a similar fashion. The dead centre of Armali - until the Reapers, at any rate - was the great Forum, which had once been not unlike the meeting hall at the heart of their camp, which doubled as the dining hall by night and now trebled as the crèche by day.

Those asari who weren't busy rebuilding and refortifying the camp were sent out on scavenging parties, after food and clothing, weapons and communications gear and anything else that seemed useful. The ones who couldn't - or wouldn't - do either of those tasks were put to watching the walls, freeing their half-dozen frazzled commandos for other vital work, or to supervising the children as they went about the simple tasks assigned to them in turn.

Liara worked them all hard, and worked herself hardest of all, to the point where Aethyta was fairly certain that the flimsy little cot she'd set up in the empty cargo hold saw precisely zero real use. At daybreak, Aethyta invariably either found her daughter hunched over the terminals arrayed beside her cot, or saw her out training with the commandos. After that, she rarely saw her at all but in glimpses, running from this project to that dispute, running out with the commandos and running back in with the scavenging parties. She didn't creep back to their freighter until after dark, until well after everyone with a lick of common sense had already gone to bed, and twice so far Aethyta had gotten up in the small hours of the morning to answer a call of nature and caught her back in front of her terminals, doing Athame knew what.

Aethyta hoped those late-night, slightly furtive sessions had rather more to do with the recovery effort here and less to do with the... other thing that she, personally, tried not to think too much about, in case her half-formed speculations crystallised into an unpleasant certainty.

Improved as it was, the camp still wasn't perfect, not by any means. Sanitation was still an issue, with the bulk of their waste going straight into the river. Liara had been uncomfortable with that, apparently concerned about anyone downstream, until Aethyta had drawn her attention to the bodies and worse floating in the murky waters. The bodies themselves, of course, were another real concern. Efrosyni had made sure to clear away and dispose of any in the area immediately surrounding the camp as a priority, but the city itself remained choked with the dead, asari and Reapers alike, and that was exactly the sort of thing that led to the outbreak of disease. And they didn't have a long-term supply of food, not yet. There wasn't anyone with any agricultural experience in any of the known camps (not that they actually had anything to grow in any case) and scavenging was difficult, dangerous work that could only last so long, provide so much.

And, for all the buzz of activity and burst of tentative optimism within the camp and the jobs thrown her way to keep her busy, Aethyta was left feeling very much out of place. For a start, the entire camp, barring the kid and the commandos, had been rather more than slightly horrified by the prospect of letting her, a matriarch, do anything remotely dangerous - and therefore fun – again, especially after some complete cow whose name she hadn't caught had suggested that Aethyta, at over a thousand years and counting, might very well be the oldest asari left alive on the planet, or even in the entire Republics.

Now _there_was a really fucking cheery thought.

If she'd been a better matriarch, she'd have been able to talk them around to her way of thinking. They needed all of the firepower they could get, and fighting was one thing she'd always been good at. It was in her genes. But she'd never had any patience for the endless, back-and-forth, passive-aggressive varrenshit and slight-of-hand manoeuvring most of the others her age seemed to delight in. And so, instead of making her case in a reasoned fashion, she'd lost her temper with the lot of them, the vote along with it, while Liara covered her face with her hand, in despair or disgust Aethyta couldn't say.

And that was reason number two for her discomfort, right there: by rights, it should be her out there, running the show, or, better yet, Benezia, or even one of the older matrons. There was no denying that the kid was good at it, as Aethyta had known that she would be, but maidens who were barely old enough to vote shouldn't have to be responsible for guiding and protecting and knocking some sense into the thick heads of what would soon be over one thousand people. That sort of thing was pretty much what matriarchs were _for_.

But if Aethyta had never been a very good matriarch, Liara, by all accounts, had never been a particularly good maiden. And, if part of Aethyta felt deeply uncomfortable about letting her youngest shoulder most of the current burden, another part of her enthusiastically cheered her on. Liara was _making_ something - a spectacular something - of herself and helping her people rather than wasting her maiden years stripping or drifting or worse. Yet, if Aethyta looked on with pride, albeit tempered by worry, Benezia watched their daughter with a kind of hesitant bewilderment, as if she were not quite willing to believe the evidence of her own eyes.

Benezia herself, of course, was reason number three.

It wasn't just that she was the Ex of Exes, with all the baggage that implied. Nor was it just that the promised part-time babysitting job had effectively become a full-time one. And it wasn't just that, between Benezia's history and her own recent outburst, most of the camp wanted as little to do with the pair of them as possible. It wasn't even just the certain knowledge that she was woefully unequipped to help Beneiza deal with whatever she was trying to deal with, and that she'd seen enough trauma cases in her lifetime to know that her usual 'toughen the fuck up, princess' approach was typically the last thing needed.

It was that Aethyta was spending virtually every waking _and_ sleeping moment in the company of her ostracised Ex of Exes whilst said Ex was struggling to stop herself from completely coming apart at the seams. Aethyta wasn't sure if she wanted to hug her or slap her half the time, and frankly, wasn't at all sure which approach Benezia would have welcomed more. Part of her former bondmate seemed to actively want some sort of, well, _punishment_for everything that had happened, as fucked up as that was, while the rest of her seemed to want to hide, or fade away into nothing rather than face reality.

Aethyta really was too old to have to deal with all of that shit and everything else besides. As that motherless pyjack in the meeting hall had pointed out, she was over a thousand, which was many more years than most asari actually saw, for all their theoretical lifespans. Life was full of dangers large and small, and, combined with the risk-taking and general stupidity of most maidens, only maybe one in a thousand actually made it to the matriarch stage in the first place. She'd gotten this far, but had, _maybe_, a hundred years left, if she was lucky. By rights, she should be enjoying a long, leisurely retirement right now, somewhere tropical, spending her days spoiling her great-granddaughters and scandalising her daughters and granddaughters by fucking the twenty year-old turian pool boy senseless then turning her attentions to his older sister.

She didn't know what had happened to any of her daughters, apart from Liara, or to their daughters and daughters' daughters. Once it became clear that war was on the horizon she'd called in every favour she'd ever been owed, bribed and blackmailed and even gone to the (remarkably obliging) Shadow Broker, trying to get them all to someplace safe, but had lost track of them once things started to heat up. She'd always made sure that her daughters could take care of themselves, but... Damnit, she should be out there, looking for them, making sure they were safe, not stuck here, riding herd on Benezia T'Soni because her daughter was too damned busy to look after her herself.

Fucking Reapers. You'd think they could have waited until she was dead to try to destroy the galaxy. From what she understood, they were millions of years old. What the hell was another century?

Fucking T'Sonis. Why couldn't they have needed somebody else?

Fucking galaxy. Fucking everything, really.

"You're pacing," a quiet, low voice behind her noted.

She was too. She hadn't really noticed.

"Well, I'm pissed off."

When she turned, she saw that Benezia had seated herself atop a cargo crate and was watching her, half-wrapped in a blanket against the early morning chill. Her skin had an unhealthy grey undertone in the pink and orange light of dawn, making the blue of her eyes seem absurdly vivid. Her sleep had been broken by nightmares every night since they'd landed, Aethyta knew. Some started with whimpers and ended with screams that would have woken the entire camp, had they not kept themselves segregated by sleeping in the freighter. Camp gossip suggested that she wasn't the only person with that particular problem.

Aethyta wasn't entirely sure what their little outpost needed more desperately – someone who could fix bodies or someone who could fix heads.

"About the vote? Still?"

"You know me," she replied, starting back the way she came. "I hold grudges. Let 'em fester."

There was a pause, and then an even more quiet: "I do."

A hundred and ten years of grudge. Justified grudge, though. Wasn't it? Leaving her? Keeping her last daughter from her?

Of course it was.

"But I do not think that it is anger that drives your feet today, not entirely," Benezia continued, and Aethyta remembered that if Benezia T'Soni was an open book to her, then the reverse was true as well. "Aethyta, what worries you so?"

"Nothing," she lied, and it was a bad, obvious lie to her own hearing.

"Please, I would help if I could. I... owe you that much, at least." Aethyta only realised that she'd come to a halt when she felt the gentle hand on her arm.

"Please," Benezia repeated.

When Aethyta turned to face her, it was the old Benezia, for the moment, standing before her, not the fragile shell the Reapers had left behind. The Benezia whose compassion and patience and generally kind nature had so often been Aethyta's undoing, once upon a time.

It was her undoing today.

"I'm just thinking about my girls," she muttered, shoulders sagging. "That's all."

Understanding dawned in those bright blue eyes.

"You've not heard from them?"

"Not a whisper," she sighed. "I tried to get 'em somewhere safe, before things went completely to crap, but so many places we thought were safe weren't. One of the colonies I wanted to send them to got hit pretty hard."

Benezia's hand slid down her arm until it reached her own, took it and squeezed it gently before letting it go.

"Go, then. Find them. You want to, and no-one would begrudge you."

She wasn't quite able to stop the short, bitter bark of laughter.

"You were at the meeting, right?" Benezia had been there but silent throughout, eyes downcast; she'd abstained from the vote when it came. "I'm too 'valuable' to be let out of the camp or up onto the walls or even down to take a piss on my own. Goddess, I feel like a caged varren."

"You certainly pace like one." This observation was actually accompanied by the ghost of a smile, the first genuine one Aethyta had seen from her since she'd woken up. "Well, perhaps they would begrudge you then. But that sort of thing has never stopped you before. Go anyway."

"I can't justify taking the freighter," she said with a shrug, which was true, "and we don't have anything else with enough fuel to leave the system. And, besides, I promised the kid I'd help keep an eye on you. How're you doing today, anyway?"

And, just like that, the old Benezia was gone.

Her eyes fell, and she retreated back to her former seat atop the cargo crate, wrapping herself again in the blanket. It was somehow painful to watch her fold back in on herself, especially in light of her smile, seconds before, and Aethyta sighed.

"Shove over," she said, and planted herself beside her former bondmate without aplomb. The crate wasn't quite wide enough for two, and she only had half a seat, but it'd do for now. "And give me some of that blanket. It's cold enough out here to freeze your tits off, and that'd be a damn shame."

A bit more than a century ago, such a statement would probably have been delivered with a mock-leer and met with an eye roll, perhaps accompanied by a tolerant smile. Now it was given awkwardly, and met with stoic silence, though Benezia did unwrap enough of the blanket from herself to give Aethyta half. Aethyta studied the her face in profile, noting the fatigue in her eyes, the clench of her jaw, the stiffness in the graceful arch of her neck and the slight layer of dust and ash and other grime they all seemed to acquire after more than a few minutes outside.

"Look, I don't wanna give you mixed signals or anything," she continued, "because what's done is done, but I'm not just sticking around here because the kid asked. We had a hundred good years together, and I think that means something, no matter how it ended. I'd like to help you, if I can," she concluded, deliberately paraphrasing Benezia's earlier words.

Benezia did not look up, but clearly spotted the parallel.

"The debts are mine, not yours."

"I'll be the judge of that. Talk to me."

For a long moment, there was only the sleepy clatter of the camp as it began to wake and prepare for the new day and the distant gurgle of the river on its unhurried journey to the sea. Then Benezia sighed and leaned in towards her, hesitantly, as if expecting to be pushed away at any moment, but Aethyta let her come, not moving until her former lover's head was resting on her shoulder, nestled against her neck. Only then did she move, and it was to carefully wrap an arm around her, pulling her closer. They still fit together seamlessly, like they always had.

Silence again reigned for a time.

"It hurts when I try to think," Benezia finally confessed, voice sad and tired and barely audible. Aethyta said nothing in return, waiting. She might not always have the words to reply, but she'd become a very good listener over the years, and was practised in creating silences that others wanted to fill. Benezia, she knew, would fill this one eventually, and, almost a minute later, she did.

"At first, I had thought that the pain was a good pain. My mind healing from the... conditioning. I thought that it would get better with time. And distance. But it's not. It's getting worse. Sometimes I just want to scream with it."

"Then scream."

"Aethy-"

"I'm serious. It might help. Sometimes bodies know what to do better than brains do."

"You don't understand."

"So, help me then," she replied, more sharply than she'd meant to, and it was some time before Benezia spoke again.

"At times it is as though a thousand shards of ice have been driven into my skull, twisting and burning. At others, my head is caught in an ever-tightening vice. I... catch myself thinking in the ways it wanted me to think, or trying not to think at all, just so that it goes away for a time. It is the final stage of the process. I've seen it. The others with me, my entourage... Some succumbed so thoroughly by the end that they would not even eat or bathe unless instructed to do so.

"I... fear that end for myself. I've no right to, but I do. What good am I without my mind? What _am_I? And so I fight. But I do not know how much longer I can continue."

"Long enough," Aethyta replied with a confidence she didn't feel. "It'll pass. Everything does eventually. You'll pull through."

"You don't know that."

"Sure I do," she said, forcing a smile as she chucked Benezia's chin, tilting her head up so that they were looking at each other again. "You're the only person I've ever met that could out-stubborn me when you put your mind to it. The kid said that you managed to fight the Reapers off while they were still alive. Now that they're dead, they've got no chance. You'll beat this."

Benezia's eyes held hers, searching. It was such a damned cliché thing to say or even think, but she'd always loved her eyes. They were as blue and changeable as the open sky and, if you knew the secret, you could read her moods by them alone. Today there was anguish and exhaustion and pain but, blooming behind all of that, cautious hope.

"You always were such a good liar," she said softly. "I can almost believe you."

"Believe whatever you want, babe," she said, and her smile this time was more genuine. "I'm more than a thousand years old. I usually know what I'm talking about."

"So you say." A pause, a fleeting, upward quirk of her lips, and Benezia was back, once more, for a few seconds. "Far be it from one as young as I to question the wisdom of the ancients."

"Ancient, am I?"

"By your own admission, I fear."

Even now, dirty, pale and underweight, eyes glistening with unshed tears, Benezia was undeniably beautiful. Maybe not in the pop-culture, supermodel sense, which favoured fresh-skinned, doe-eyed, underfed and under-dressed maidens, but in the classical one, regal, as if she were some throwback to the ancient merchant queens that had once ruled this city and others with guile and cunning and sex. Those high cheekbones, the proud line of her nose and jaw, the delicate markings that drew your attention to those bottomless blue eyes, the broad, dark stripe that highlighted her lips, soft and eminently kissable, the dappling that ran down the sides of her neck, around her perfect breasts, down the line of her stomach...

Benezia must have seen something of her thoughts in her eyes, because her own widened slightly and she pulled away, rising to her feet, turning away. Aethyta inwardly cursed, but let her go, needing the space just as badly. The kid was right, damn her hide: she still had feelings for Benezia, and they weren't all bad ones. Far from it, if protests from her body at the loss of contact with those soft curves were any judge. Goddess, she'd buried their relationship at least three times already, each time thinking it was for good. You'd think it could have the decency to stay dead! There was no future in it at all, just heated memories and regret, and she had enough to worry about without being distracted by either.

"You want to know what happened to your daughters," Benezia said abruptly, her back still turned. "I would know what happened to mine."

Aethyta stared at her, simultaneously annoyed and relieved that Benezia had deliberately gone for the one topic certain to drive a wedge between them, and done so in a manner designed to wound on multiple levels. Anger would easier to deal with. Hell, it always had been. She just needed to remember Liara, remember all of the broken promises, remember that Benezia had left her without explanation, without even a proper goodbye. Remember why Aethyta hadn't chased after her. Five minutes of fellowship was not nearly enough to wipe all of that away.

"She's thirty seconds away," she supplied brusquely. "Go ask her yourself."

"I've tried. She avoids my questions."

"Well, maybe you're asking the wrong ones then."

"If that is the case, then I don't know what the right ones are. I hardly feel as if I know her anymore."

Aethyta scowled, unseen, and stood herself, wrapping the blanket around her body like a cloak.

"I dunno know what you're complaining to me for." After all, it wasn't as if Benezia T'Soni hadn't made it abundantly fucking clear that Liara was _her_daughter, not Aethyta's. Even offering the kid the opportunity to meet her father on her own terms had proven to be too much to ask. But, hey, if you could walk out on a bonding of a century without so much as a goodbye, what was another broken promise?

"I thought, perhaps, that you-"

"You thought that what? That I'd fill in the blanks for you?"

"You were present for the last four years. I was… not. "

Four years out of a hundred and ten. No, not even four years. You _might_ manage to stretch it to three, if you took it from the date she'd accepted the contract, but spying on someone from a distance hardly counted as having a relationship with them. And for a good chunk of those three years, Aethyta had honestly thought that her youngest daughter was dead. If you added up all of the time they'd _actually_ spent together before now, with Liara knowing what the relationship between them was, it'd come to less than a standard day.

"Well, it's not my fucking fault you got yourself put on ice," she snapped. "And it's not like you didn't have Liara all to yourself for more than a century. If you didn't learn how to push her buttons in that time, you did more things wrong than I thought. Grow a quad and ask her until she answers. Or don't. It ain't my problem either way."

The crack about her icing might have gone a bit far, she realised, when Benezia bowed her head and made no move to reply, and Aethyta felt an unwelcome pang of guilt that only made her more annoyed. She had a right to be angry without feeling bad about it, goddessdamn it. More than a right. But right here, right now, it'd only feed the part of Benezia that was looking for punishment. Either that or drive her further back into herself, and Aethyta probably wouldn't get any satisfaction from seeing one or the other.

Shit.

She sighed, ran a hand over the top of her head and crests and made a masterful attempt to force her anger back down to a slow simmer rather than a rolling boil. Her next words to her former bondmate, for all they were clipped, were level and bordering on unnaturally pleasant.

"I'm going to go see what new horror's on the breakfast menu. You coming or not?"

Benezia sighed herself but followed after, trailing a few feet behind in silence, head still bowed. They didn't speak again for the rest of the morning.


	11. Liara (ten)

**Ten: Liara  
**

* * *

"Delegation," Benezia said, her voice tired but laced with wry resignation, "is an art form, and one that you would do well to master if you intend to continue at this pace."

Liara's head jerked up from its resting place atop her desk, wincing as the tight, tender skin down the side and front of her neck pulled with the sharp motion. She winced again, inwardly, when a data stick slowly unpeeled itself from her undamaged cheek and fell, clattering away amongst the clutter surrounding the bases of her monitors. She touched her hand to her face then, feeling the rectangular indentation the stick left here.

And for one, long, horrible moment, she was a gangly thirty year-old again, caught staying up well past her bedtime and now due a lecture from her disapproving, exasperated mother. She blinked, opened her mouth to stammer out an excuse, and then, at the last second, remembered where, and, more importantly, _who _she was now: Liara T'Soni, Shadow Broker, war veteran, elected leader of this encampment, chosen bondmate of Commander Shepard and a hundred other things besides. She did not make excuses. Even to her own mother.

Her mouth snapped shut again.

Still, falling asleep at her desk was a very bad habit, one that she'd been trying to break since her first years at university. Unfortunately, it was also one that had been not so much enabled as encouraged by the war; on the Normandy, Shepard, Garrus and Tali and the others had been in no position to judge the hours she chose to keep. Here and now, however, it wouldn't do to be caught napping in such a fashion. When you were the leader, you had to put on a strong public face. Moments of weakness - doubt, confusion, pain, sorrow, fatigue - were private. Shepard had told her once that people can only have confidence in you if you seem to have confidence in yourself.

At least it was her mother who had found her, and not someone whose heart she had to win.

"I do delegate," she countered after she'd regained her composure, only to have her protest undermined by a yawn.

The motion pulled uncomfortably at the right side of her face, much as her earlier movements did to her neck, and she repressed another wince. Asari healed, if not more quickly, than more completely than every other known species bar the vorcha, but the burns had been deep, the cuts to the bone, and they'd used up all of their miracles keeping Shepard alive. Without a dermal regenerative unit, it would be years, Karin had told her, perhaps decades, before the scars would fade and the skin fully heal over. A few decades, at the very most, of ugliness, discomfort and numbness, the loss of an eye and some fingers and teeth – Liara considered it all a very small price to pay. It was something that she reminded herself of every time she chanced to catch her own reflection.

"Not near as much as you need to. You patrol with the commandos, forage with the scavenging parties, oversee the building works, stand watch-"

Liara felt her eye narrow, more than slightly discomforted to realise that her mother was apparently tracking her movements so closely. She wasn't quite sure _why_she was surprised to find out this was so - Benezia had always kept a very close eye on her, and it wasn't as if Liara was hiding most of her activities - but something about the realisation niggled at her nonetheless.

Moreover, she had not come so far, done so much, to stand being lectured like a naughty schoolgirl. She had experienced more, _accomplished _more in the past four years than most of her elders managed over their entire lifetimes. She was at least their equal. But if she was going to stand up to the matriarchs when she inevitably came into conflict with them, she would have to lay the groundwork for it here, now, with the most intimidating one of all.

"Those things all need my attention," she said mildly.

"Perhaps," Benezia allowed, equally mild, "but not all of them to the extent to which you presently give it. Must you go out with the scavenging parties?"

"I spent almost fifty years working around ruins of one sort or another. I am the only person in the camp who's qualified to assess what buildings are and aren't structurally sound. There were several deaths and more injuries before I arrived."

For all her irritation, the words came out more brusquely than she'd meant them to. To cover her annoyance at her lapse, she occupied her hands straightening the clutter piled upon her desk. It was a poor setup indeed compared to her now lost facilities at Hagalaz, or even to her room on the Normandy, but she hadn't dared bring the bulk of her equipment with her. The handful of monitors, three communications terminals and a dozen scattered datapads and sticks were better than nothing, however, and what remained of her information network had been warned to expect disruption and delays, months of low-priority backlog.

When she looked back up, it was to find her mother watching her, an odd expression on her face. As Liara studied Benezia in turn, she was distantly shocked by how much the asari before her differed from the mother of her memory. Her mother had always been a beautiful, slightly distant figure with an enigmatic smile, a love of bright colours and a wardrobe full of flowing gowns. The asari seated across the desk from her was thin and pale and tired, her face drawn with pain, her shoulders hunched. She was dressed like the rest of them, in warm but filthy pants and jacket, the dark grey of which did nothing for her pallor. She was, as she had been that terrible day on Noveria, and again that first evening aboard the freighter, suddenly small and very mortal, not at all the untouchable goddess of her childhood.

But if that was what she saw in Benezia now, what did her mother see in her?

"I'm lecturing you again, aren't I?" Benezia said abruptly, her eyes falling closed, hand flying up to massage her temple.

"A little," Liara agreed, taken aback.

"I had not meant to. I only-" Benezia sighed, eyes opening, hand dropping. "I was concerned for you. I did not see you eat dinner."

Her hand fell further, to a jacket pocket, which produced a pair of triangular MRE packs. She checked the labels, then offered one across; Liara took it with the sudden realisation that she couldn't remember eating lunch either, and that breakfast had been a very long time ago indeed.

Liara's stomach growled at the thought of food, earning her a slight smile and an "I thought as much" before Benezia ripped the top off of her pack. It steamed, momentarily filling the cargo hold with the enticing smell of meat and savoury spices, but then MREs, in Liara's unfortunately extensive experience, always smelled better than they looked. Or tasted. Liara quickly tore open her own, and the two of them ate in silence, Liara trying not to stare when her mother, without any apparent hesitation or embarrassment, resorted to using her hands when the flimsy utensil broke, deftly scooping the hot morsels into her mouth and licking her fingers clean. Benezia had always been refined, fastidious.

"I did mean what I said about delegation," Benezia said carefully when they were done. "You're working too hard. You will burn yourself out if you are not careful."

Liara began to protest anew, but stopped, mouth hanging half-open.

This was Benezia T'Soni talking. She'd been counted as a leader amongst their people for centuries, since well before Liara had even been born. No, forget that: this was _her mother _talking, offering her advice. How many times over the last few years had she longed for just five minutes of her counsel? And yet she was just going to ignore it, now that she had it?

Shepard wouldn't have, she knew. The Spectre expected all of her crew to provide her with honest opinions, honest advice, honest truth, even if it wasn't what she _wanted _to hear. She'd hear them all out, weigh up this idea with that fact and those suppositions, and then decide on a course of action. Liara could do the same. She shouldn't dismiss things out of hand because she didn't like what she'd heard, or felt she had to prove herself more powerful and knowing than person who was saying them. If she let herself get into that mindset, she'd be no better than the thrice-damned Council.

"Perhaps," she conceded. "What do you suggest?"

Benezia was silent for a moment.

"You should look at how best to optimise your time. Take the scavenging parties. Were it not for your structural evaluation expertise, would it be necessary for you to accompany them?"

Liara frowned. It _had _been necessary for her to go out with the scavenging parties. They'd needed her knowledge, her gun and, not to be immodest, the reassurance of her presence. She, on the other hand, had needed to get a feel for the lay of the land around them and an idea of sorts of things they might expect to find, in what condition and quantities. But was her presence still required? It she were being honest with herself then... no, it wasn't. Now that the commandos were rested enough to run the necessary security, she was really little more than another pair of hands to clear and haul once the structural survey was out of the way.

"Probably not."

Benezia nodded.

"Then your value to that task is as an assessor. Concentrate your efforts there, and give oversight of the scavenging parties themselves to another."

"I... suppose I could go ahead of them and do the survey work on my own-"

"With an escort," Benezia insisted.

"I'm not a child anymore," Liara shot back, her irritation of earlier returning. "I can take care of myself."

"As you were taking care of yourself when you were burned?"

She stopped her hand from flying to her face just in time.

"That was different."

"How, precisely?"

It had all happened so quickly, and yet it had seemed to be the longest minute of her life. In one heartbeat, she was running, her lungs burning, eyes streaming from the smoke, a few metres behind Shepard as the two of them and Garrus hurtled down towards the beam. The next, the Mako was pin-wheeling through the air in slow motion towards her, and then Shepard, _Goddess_, Shepard was _turning back_...

Mother and daughter, their gazes locked and held.

"Fine," Liara said shortly. "_With an escort_."

She redirected her attention to one of her terminals, flicking it over to the list of dossiers she'd been building on the camp's occupants, scanning for names, faces and skillsets until one jogged her memory. She brought it up and swung the monitor around so Benezia could see.

"Palla Liakos was an assistant to Matriarch Efrosyni's steward before the war. She has shown herself to be a competent organiser with a strong work ethic and a good eye for salvage. She seems like the logical person to take over coordination of the scavenging work."

"A good choice," Benezia said after a beat, barely glancing at the display, and Liara remembered that her mother had probably met the matron at some point, if only on a professional capacity. "She will do well, and I believe she will relish the distraction of responsibility now that," her voice hitched slightly, "Rosi is dead. Take her with you when you conduct your surveys so that you may plan together, and that she might learn from you."

That seemed reasonable enough. And it would make her feel better about taking a guard. Palla, for all her other skills, had shaky biotics and had never fired a gun in her life before Liara had made basic arms training part of the daily routine for anyone intending to venture beyond the compound's walls.

"Ok," she agreed, and turned the monitor back around. "Anything else?"

"Potentially. Have the commandos elected a leader yet?"

Liara frowned, not sure where this was leading.

"I don't believe so. But I don't see-"

"Then I would suggest that you approach the huntress you feel best suited for the task and ask her to call a vote. Sooner rather than later. With your backing, she will be more likely to be elected, and will be more likely to remain in place if already established before the Pishan camp arrives with their three. Do you have a preference?"

"Aurelia-" she began.

"-is very young-"

"I don't care how old she is."

She honestly didn't, and, frankly, given her own youth, could not afford to. If anything, she'd been trying to make a point of being age-blind when it came to assigning tasks, focusing instead on ability and leadership skills. Aurelia might be barely seventy, not even old enough to vote yet, but there was no denying that the girl was smart, skilled and resourceful, and had the respect of her fellows. She'd had to be good, to get herself and so many others through the invasion and bombardment where asari five, even ten times her age had failed.

"-and she is equally devoted to you," Benezia continued, slightly louder, over her objection. "You need only look at her to see it. Ask her to be the first member of your personal guard. I believe that she will accept, and it is the kind of work she is trained for. I can provide the formal words with which to extend the invitation, if you like."

"Personal guard?" Liara spluttered, more than a little taken aback. "I told you, I can-"

"Hear me out, please," Benezia said, one hand raised for silence, the other pinching the bridge of her nose. "You intend to retain leadership of the camp once the Pischan group arrives, yes? And if the Vael'Dra and Tetrallia camps join us as well? And any others we might encounter?"

"Well, yes," Liara admitted. She hadn't so much intended as _presumed_. "But I don't see-"

"Then you will need the guard," Benezia said firmly, her hands dropping once more to her lap. "Eventually, more than just the one. It is not just about protection, Liara, though I admit that I will feel better for knowing that you have it. It is about _status_. The guard says that you are too important to the community to be risked. It says that there are those who believe that service to your cause, your ideas is worthwhile endeavour. That others feel you capable of leading."

"You had a whole platoon at one stage," Liara remembered.

Benezia had always had an armed escort, back as far as Liara could recall. Her childhood had been full of serious, armed and armoured figures training out on the balconies and in the gardens, stoic asari who'd turned every excursion embarked upon, no matter how minor, into a circus, if not an outright ordeal. Most of them had intimidated Liara dreadfully when she was little. Later, as a young adult, she'd railed against them for affording her only the illusion of privacy, and resented them for stealing her mother away from her ever more frequently. The last holiday they'd taken together, ostensibly a mother-daughter affair to celebrate Liara's fiftieth birthday, had included an entourage of almost sixty, and been cut short by some crisis or another back home. It was only when Liara had escaped to university the following year that she'd gotten free of them all, and confirmed her suspicions that few other asari lived as they had, guarded and herded constantly.

Several of the other students had teased her mercilessly about her upbringing, when they'd learned of it and who her mother was. The poor little rich pureblood, who didn't even know how to make her own dinner because there'd always been someone on staff. Go run back to your mother, they'd sneered. She nearly had, more than once, after her attempts to defend herself had backfired. In the end, it had seemed both safer and somehow less cowardly to lose herself in her studies instead.

"Yes," Benezia said with a sad smile, and Liara remembered, as well, that whatever entourage Benezia had taken with her after Saren was dead now, to an asari, with the possible exception of Shiala. However much Liara had resented them, they deserved their fate no more than her mother did. "And consider what that said about me and my place amongst our people."

"I thought a personal guard volunteered themselves," Liara said carefully, searching for a way out. Even if it wasn't completely unnecessary, she'd had enough of that sort of thing to last a lifetime. "Or were assigned by the city."

"Most, yes. But the one you wish to be your guard captain should always be asked into your service, for much the same reason you should ask the one you wish to lead the other forces to call the leadership vote."

"We cannot really afford spare anyone at the moment just to stand outside my door looking official."

"She will need not attend you all of the time, not yet. But if you do not choose a guard yourself and intend to stay in a leadership role, it is inevitable that the community will force one upon you, much as they are attempting to force Aethyta to stay behind the walls," Benezia said, not unkindly. "The outcome will be the same, but you will not have the choosing of those who watch your back. And, without a guard, you will have greater difficulty in convincing any other matriarchs you encounter to take you seriously. They _may _elect to overlook your youth in dealing with you, but they will overlook you entirely if you do not present some visible representation of your powerbase."

Liara pinched the bridge of her nose with her good hand, unconsciously mirroring her mother's gesture of earlier. She could feel the beginnings of a headache. Goddess, but she hated politics. But what had she come here to do, ultimately, if not get involved in just that? If she were to effect any sort of change, she must give at least give the appearance of playing along with the system as it presently stood.

"Fine," she sighed, ungracious to her own ears. "I will consider it. What else?"

Benezia watched her for what seemed to be a very long time, eyes searching her face until Liara began to feel uncomfortable under the scrutiny.

"Yes..?" she prompted, to cover her rising discomfort.

"Liara..." Benezia began, her voice soft, gentle. "Why are you doing this?"

Liara felt her heart sink. This was going to be it, she knew. No more evasions. No more lies, other than the necessary ones, the ones she told everyone. Still, she tried, summoning up her best, most neutral expression.

"Someone has to."

"I know. But my question would be: why must it be you? You are so young, and I know that you have always hated politics." When Liara didn't immediately answer, she continued, in a much softer, almost pleading voice: "What did you do during the war, Little Wing? It seems that everyone in the camp knows but me. They treat you like a hero."

Liara wet her lips, her mouth feeling unaccountably dry.

"You have to understand that much of what happened aboard the Normandy is classified," she said slowly, carefully. "My role most of all. People... speculate."

"What, then, was your role?"

"Intelligence," she said, knowing that this was close enough to the truth to pass for it, and the official cover story besides. "Translations. Research. Some field missions. Coordinating the supply chain for the Crucible. And, well, I suppose you could call me Commander Shepard's second officer as well, after Garrus -Garrus Vakarian. Commander Shepard was the Spectre the Council, um, sent after-"

"I know." Her mother pressed her hand, almost absently, to her side where she'd been shot. "She is also the one they now call the 'saviour of the galaxy', is she not?"

"Yes," she agreed, knowing full well how the title would vex her beloved when she awoke, let alone the increasingly messianic way some people spoke of her. "She cured the Genophage and got the krogan to fight alongside the turians for almost the entire war, forced peace between the geth and the quarians and united the whole galaxy to face the Reapers. She was the only person to make it to the Citadel to activate the Crucible. Were it not for her, none of us would be alive today."

She was not quite able to keep the pride from her voice as she spoke, and found she didn't care. Shepard deserved pride, praise. Love.

Benezia was watching her intently again.

"Your wounds - from a mission?"

"I... was part of Hammer," she admitted, staring, not at her mother, but at the blank monitor array, at the memory within her own mind. _Screaming at Shepard, her and Garrus both, to go, go damn her! The Mako, crashing to the earth, knocking them both back, off their feet, the breath leaving her lungs in an explosion of air. A taloned hand in hers, pulling her upright. _"With Shepard. And Garrus. It was the final push. All or nothing. Garrus and I were caught in an explosion."

_A lance of hot red, cutting through the Mako like butter. Diving to the side after Garrus. Hearing the _whoomph_ from within the tank, the flare of orange light. Pouring everything she had left into her barrier through her outflung hand, feeling it melt away under the sudden blast of heat and light and pressure. Darkness. Pain. Fear. Shepard-__  
_  
She blinked, and there was a hand covering her own, with its missing and mutilated fingers, concerned eyes meeting her remaining one.

"Liara-"

"I'm fine. Sorry," she said, returning to the present and managing a wan smile. "Shepard made it in the end. She was the only thing that mattered."

She slipped her hand out from under her mother's with that and turned her attention back to her terminals. It was the work of seconds to load up a datastick with most of the material she'd excised from the pad she'd given her mother that first night.

"Here," she said, holding it out for Benezia to take. "This should answer most of your questions. Those that it can't... I'll answer what I can. Much of it is-"

"Classified. I understand," her mother agreed, taking the stick. There was another long pause, Benezia watching her carefully once more before she spoke:

"Aethy... Aethyta says that you have finally taken a lover."

"Yes," she said, feeling that she ought to be surprised or angered or even embarrassed by the new line of questioning, but finding none of those emotions within herself.

Another pause.

"It's this 'Shepard', isn't it?"

Mother and daughter, their gazes locked and held.

"Yes."


	12. Benezia (eleven)

_A/N: Sorry for the long delay folks. Hoping to get back into a more regular updating schedule here. And thank you all so much for your comments so far._**  
**

**Eleven: Benezia**

* * *

When she reached the end of the material, hours later, Benezia was left with but one question, a thought that circled round and round her aching head without ever coming to rest long enough to be answered:

Was this her fault, too?

It was so very hard to reconcile the serious, driven, _angry_young maiden in the cargo hold with her daughter. Liara had always been serious, yes, even as a child, and driven too, if only in the pursuit of those things that interested her. But, equally, she had been gentle and sweet-natured, slow to anger, quick to forgive and open in her affections - if slow to initially give them out. It was even harder to reconcile her shy, academically-minded Little Wing, a child who'd been timid to the point of awkwardness for most of her life, with the warrior lionised by the wartime press as a biotic powerhouse, someone who easily kept pace with battle-hardened Spectres and Special Forces soldiers, someone who was accustomed to command and making difficult decisions.

No, that was not exactly true. It was not difficult to _reconcile_ the two versions of her Liara. By the end of her first pass through the material, the collection of articles and vids and still images had melded into one long, sad account of how her daughter had the last remnants of her childhood and innocence stripped away from her, by death, by deceit and by war. One could track the transition from sweet child to hard-eyed adult over the too-few years, needing only a little imagination to fill in the gaps. What was difficult, however, was _acceptance_.

Was this her fault, too? Another life she had ruined in her pride?

Noveria was the start of it; that much was plain. Or even before that, on Therum, where Liara had been when Benezia had suggested that Saren bring her daughter to her. Of all the myriad esoteric things in the galaxy she could have developed an interest in, Liara had managed to pick the one on which the Reaper's return had swung. They would use her, as they had used everyone else.

Benezia remembered the small part of her that had always remained herself, locked away behind the glass, weeping and cursing and screaming at the thought of bringing Liara into the waking nightmare her life had become, but to no avail. She had been unable to stop herself from making the suggestion and the order, once given, was something else she had never found the strength to countermand. She had not found such strength at all until she had come face to face with Liara for what should have been the final time, and then only when aided by pain and fear and the likelihood of her imminent death.

Liara been saved from Benezia's own fate, at least, and Benezia supposed she owed the human Spectre something for that. But from that moment on, it was a downwards spiral, captured as a part of the public record for all to see.

Still images, a few snippets of vid from not long after the... confrontation on Noveria, Liara looking lost and angry and so very, very young. An unlikely quintet of a krogan, a quarian, a turian and two humans attempted to shield her, with limited success, from a horde of asari from the Citadel's press corps. The six of them, together, were famous now, she knew: Commander Shepard and the Normandy Five, and not one of them still looked the same now as then.

The awards ceremony, following the defeat of Sovereign and Saren, in full this time rather than the fragments the news services had broadcast. There was enough footage available for Benezia to realise the smiles from the recipients, Liara included, were forced, angry, their acceptance speeches short and ghost-written. A journal article, from not long after, and several informal notes, published to extranet, forums hinted at an attempted return to normalcy: Liara's ongoing attempts to decipher several prothean data discs evidentially found during their travels. And then...

Disaster. The death of the first human Spectre, the destruction of her ship. Liara, alone amidst a sea of uniformed humans, wrapped in a blanket, staring without seeing at a human-style mug held between two hands. Liara, exchanging a hug with the quarian, tears in her eyes, her face aged and haggard. Liara, the quarian and the turian beside her, stoically sitting at the back of a funeral party, surrounded by black-clad and uniformed humans, listening to a speech being given by the woman who would become the second human Spectre.

Duty. Honour. Courage. Friendship. Loss.

A little less than two years on Illium – Illium! -of all places, working as an intel broker, just as Aethyta had said. And, just as Aethyta had said, Liara seemed to have lost her way whilst there. The reports of her time on the lawless planet were a disturbing and confusing mess of gossip, lies, speculation and precious little truth, charting her absolutely meteoric rise through the ranks of Illium's information brokering fraternity.

Her rapid ascent was at once a vindication and source of deep concern. Benezia had always known that Liara would go far, if only she could be dragged away from her history books long enough to engage with the people around her. She was so _smart_- and that wasn't just a mother's pride talking - and had a gift for making connections and spotting patterns within the greater whole that matriarchs seven or eight times her age would envy. It was little surprise that she had been so very good at her second choice of profession.

But _information brokering_! It was a dirty, dangerous profession, skirting on the very edges of legality and seen by many as just one step above smuggling or stealing or slaving. And it was also a role that called for a ruthlessness that she would not have thought her Liara, her gentle, kind-hearted little girl, capable of. And yet there was ruthlessness, even a kind of _brutality _hinted at in the abrupt end to the sad affair. The return of the supposedly dead Shepard and the death of Spectre Vasir. Bombings. Murders. Liara's own supposed death. And, Goddess above, it was, all of it, laced persistent rumours of some sort of a feud between Liara and the _Shadow Broker_...

Was this her fault, too? Yet another crime to be laid at her feet?

Or was it this Shepard's?

She felt the echo of anger, again, at the thought of the human Spectre, and was not sure whether it came from within her true self or not. But if Benezia's actions might have started Liara's descent, then Shepard's had continued it, driven it to its conclusion. The events leading up to Saren's defeat would not have been enough to drive Liara to such depths, of that Benezia was certain, but grief might - grief and despair and loneliness. To open her heart for the first time, for Liara, who was so shy and sensitive and insecure at the best of times, to finally understand the joy that comes from being in another's arms and thoughts, and then to have that wrenched away from her barely a heartbeat later, to have no-one there to guide her through her grief and share the burden of her pain -

And then it turned out that Shepard's death had been another _lie_, and all Liara's suffering for naught. Were all humans so cruel? The Spectre had dragged Liara to Noveria and forced her into a situation where she had to shoot her own _mother_, where someone with the barest flickerings of compassion would have left her in a place of safety. She had, too, brought Liara to her bed and stolen her heart, only to fling it aside like some worthless bauble when she no longer had need of it.

But Shepard had evidentially come to need her again, her skills and knowledge, and had come back, faking Liara's death so she could be safely stolen away from Nos Astra. And Liara, for whatever reason, had gone with her, taken her back. Her voice, when speaking of the human, was laced with proprietary pride and wonder.

From there - and the exact timeline got somewhat murky - Liara had gone to a classified facility attached to the Prothean archive on Mars, in the human's home system. It was there that she'd made the discovery that Benezia knew she would go down in history for. No wonder the others in the camp treated her with such reverence: from everything she had read and heard and seen to date, the Crucible was the only reason why any of them were still alive. On the tide of victory, after the war, Liara had been revealed publically as its discoverer and chief translator. Staggering to think that without her daughter, without the childhood obsession Benezia had worked so hard to dissuade, the galaxy would likely have fallen.

And that was but the half of it. Liara, fighting on Menae. Liara, talking with refugees on the Citadel. Liara, at a war meeting with Spectre Shepard, Garrus Vakarian and the heads or de facto heads of several governments. Liara, the subject of an in-depth, interactive profile by an award-winning turian journalist, lauding her transition from academic to warrior.

Battle footage from Eden Prime. Battle footage from Tuchanka. Benezia watched, her heart in her mouth, as the tiny spec that was Liara, her white armour shining like a beacon in the ash-strewn waste, fell back as the great maw Kalros rose. Infrequent interviews with the Normandy's embedded reporter, Liara obviously not enjoying the experience but getting more comfortable before the camera each time. A 'Day in the Life' vid done by the same reporter, who had managed to balance the daily grind and stress of ship life during wartime with moments of optimism, including a human-style surprise party that the crew had thrown for Liara's one hundred and tenth birthday, over her laughing protestations - one of the few times that Liara's smile seemed genuine in the entire collection.

Propaganda, certainly, to various degrees and in ever increasing quantities, but the overall picture served to paint Liara as a hero second only to Shepard herself.

Her daughter, the hero.

Benezia allowed herself a moment to taste the words and savour the flicker of pride, before she remembered that all Liara had accomplished had been despite, not because, of her. Had she her way, Liara would most likely have been dead by now, the galaxy along with her. And, if Liara now served her people and engaged with them as Benezia had once so dearly hoped she might, it was not done out of any real desire to serve, nor any enjoyment taken from the endeavour. No, she felt that she _had_to. A maiden of one hundred and ten, serving in the role of a matriarch because she didn't think there was anyone else in the community capable of leading in this crisis. What was perhaps worse was that she was, so far, proving herself right.

Her daughter might be a hero, yes, but she could claim no credit, and would live on knowing that it had come at a horrendous cost. Liara was old before her time, now, and suffering for it. Benezia was not the only one afflicted by nightmares, she knew, and she could watch Liara shutting down her emotions, one by one, every time they spoke until they were all stripped away to leave nothing but the ever-present anger that had replaced curiosity as her motive force. Her innocence was long gone. Her delight in the universe and all its wonders, lost. Her gentleness and kind heart ground away and buried, her affections guarded.

Was this her fault, too? Or Shepard's? Or both of them together? She had no answer.

When she finally awoke the following morning, the sun was well past the horizon and Liara long gone. The night of restless sleep, plagued by nightmares wherein Liara stood in the place of Shiala and her other acolytes, combined with the late night itself had left her feeling so drained and bone-weary that she had seriously considered not rising from her bed at all. Two things, however, had stopped her from her passing the day in a sleepy, blessedly thoughtless stupor: the threat of still more unwelcome dreams, and the certain knowledge that, if she did not rise today, she would find it even more difficult to so on the morrow.

Well, two things, and a third, if you counted Aethyta. Her former bondmate had spent the night in one of the communal halls rather than aboard the freighter, but had come by to check on her when she'd not appeared for breakfast. She'd departed again, upon seeing Benezia up and moving, with little more than a perfunctory grunt of 'good morning', and had avoided her for the rest of the day. It seemed that she'd abandoned the idea of being her 'minder' in Liara's absence, at least for the moment, a decision Benezia wasn't entirely sure how to feel regarding. The return of such distance was undoubtedly a good thing, and yet the day was undeniably more of a struggle without her solid, unflappable presence, and even her occasional bouts of grousing.

It was startling, truly, to realise just how much she'd missed Aethyta. It had all come back to her in a rush, the previous morning, how they'd used to be. The hundred sunrises they'd shared, each one marking the day of their bonding, and the untold number of sunsets. Ten thousand nights had been spent safely encircled in those strong arms, lulled warmth of her body, the slow rhythm of her breathing and the beating of her heart. Innumerable thoughts shared, playful flirtations and jests and subtle games beyond counting, debates that challenged and arguments that had always seemed to end up with them in bed together. Her body had remembered too, the warmth rising from her belly to cut through the lingering aches. And, for a few heartbeats, she'd seen the same recognition, the same remembrance in Aethyta's eyes.

It had been too much to bear, and she'd been forced to pull away from the comfort provided before she did something rash. She simply had no right, as Aethy herself had said. She had no right to want her again after she had cast her aside, not now, not ever, and certainly not just because the ground was quicksand beneath her feet and she wanted something stable to hold on to.

But she missed Aethyta all the same, almost as much as she'd ever done during those first few difficult decades without her. And without her to trail after here, through the camp, Benezia felt... lost. Aimless. Purposeless. And lonely. Of all things, she felt lonely. The other residents regarded her with nervousness, if not suspicion or outright hostility, and she could not bear to meet their eyes, most times, lest she saw the pity or the accusation there.

Yet, for all their discomfort, they were unwilling to let an able pair of hands sit idle, not when there was still so much to be done. Since they did not trust her to mind the children, nor to sit watch upon the walls or tally stores, she had found herself drafted into a construction team the moment they'd spied her, sitting alone and staring silently up into the grey, ash-laden clouds that blanketed the once pristine sky. The work was hard, especially to someone for whom gardening had been the closest thing to manual labour ever undertaken, but oddly relaxing. She could lift and carry and hold under the direction of others without needing to think about anything other than the task at hand, and the burn of exertion, the ache of her muscles, was strangely sweet. And, as that rose, the pounding in her head slowly diminished.

That the work was rewarding as well helped.

By the time they'd finished the project, some unknown point in the late afternoon, the mood in the camp was positively buoyant, so much so that even Benezia could not help but be affected by it, to some small degree. A cheer had gone up when the last piece of piping had been laid, and another once the final tests had been completed, the last leaks plugged. A laughing, jostling queue had formed not long after, its members joking with one another as to who had dreamed more of this moment over the past weeks or, in many cases, months.

A shower. A simple dream, perhaps, but a dream nonetheless, and seeing it achieved was cause for hope and celebration.

Benezia, one of the last to take her turn, sighed with something approaching satisfaction and ducked her head beneath the hot spray, feeling some more of the tension leave her body along with the layers of accumulated grime. She hadn't bathed since the morning after her reawakening, the freighter's small shower unit having been quickly stripped out for use by the wounded and ill in the medical tent. She hid a smile when a trio of small children ran by, squealing and slipping and trailing soapy water, and exchanged basic pleasantries with a matron who, up until now, had nothing for her but silence and dark, suspicious looks. It was, she knew, the first conversation she'd had with someone other than Liara or Aethyta since awakening; she could hear the rust and surprise in her own voice. Further down the undivided, open-air block, a maiden and matron whose names she did not know coupled quietly in a cloud of steam, dark eyes and wandering hands ignored by all with practiced ease.

She was just debating finishing up, torn between the soothing water and the knowledge that her allotted five minutes was long over (though no-one had seemed to mind overruns so far), when she spotted Aurelia hastening past the block in the direction of the unofficial barracks, her arms full of white and blue armour. Seconds later, Palla Liakos and Liara herself entered the showers, talking animatedly. Palla stopped abruptly when she caught sight of Benezia, but Liara continued on, oblivious or affecting such, and stepped up to the shower to Benezia's right. After a beat, Palla followed, taking the final unoccupied station, one down from Liara's own.

"I see that you took my advice," Benezia murmured. Commandos would only handle and service the armour of their sisters in arms, or the one they were sworn to protect.

"It was good advice, even if I didn't like it," Liara shrugged, and then sighed in pleasure, eye falling closed as the first drops of hot water began to fall. Benezia took the opportunity to glance her over; Liara's armour had hidden more scars than she'd realised, some old and faded, some new and livid like the ugly burns, standing in even starker relief. Of greatest concern was the fist-sized, skin-coloured dressing that that sat above her hip on her stomach, matched by an identical one, sat slightly higher, opposite on her back. What had done that Benezia shuddered to think, and absently touched her own side, feeling the new, raised scar there.

"Goddess, but I've been looking forward to this all day."

"You had this planned?"

"I offered the construction group a choice of three projects," Liara said, lathering up carefully. "I cannot say that I'm particularly surprised that they picked this one."

"It has made many people happy."

"You included, I hope." Liara glanced over at her and smiled. "You're looking better."

"I am feeling somewhat better," she conceded, feeling she ought to say more but not quite knowing where to begin. This was not the forum to talk of what she had learned last night, nor was it the venue to discuss… other things. Liara, fortunately, filled the silence for her.

"If this is the kind of result we get, I suppose I should begin to give the builders more autonomy too. I don't suppose you'd be interested in taking charge of them..?"

"I think not." Not now. Perhaps never again. Just thinking about it made her heart race, her head hurt. Her mind was clouded, her judgement compromised; she should not be trusted.

Liara nodded, but didn't seem surprised.

"And I suspect that Aethyta would tell me to do something anatomically impossible if I asked her. Well, I'm sure there's someone who will be good at it." She frowned and glanced around. "Where is Aethyta, anyway?"

"I do not know. I've not seen her since breakfast."

Liara's frown deepened, and Benezia could all but see her file the tidbit away for future consideration.

"No matter," she said after a moment with a shrug, and returned her focus to her bathing. "While you're here though, I do have a question, and I think you're the only person here who might be able to answer it."

"You know you may always ask," she replied immediately, intrigued despite herself.

"But you may decline to answer," Liara completed the phrase for her and smiled again, but the edge of it was somewhat grim. "Or I may not like the one you give. Under what circumstances is an Ardat-Yakshi permitted to return to the homeworld?"


	13. Aethyta (twelve)

Two updates in under a month? Clearly something has gone awry.

Some recs, if I may. If you're in the market for more Benezia/Aethyta, I heartily suggest u/4224952/R-J-Ames. If you like asari, thrillers and cracking good reads, s/8627108/1/A-Few-Personal-Favors will certainly keep you on the edge of your seat.

And, finally, thank you for all your lovely comments. They give me such lovely warm fuzzies.

* * *

**Twelve: Aethyta**

"That's the best you've got?" Aethyta sneered, spitting blood towards her opponent's feet. "My old granny could hit harder than that, and she's dead and buried."

The krogan charged at her with a roar, urged on by the jeers and laughter of the others in his company. Aethyta held her ground until he was almost on top of her, then ducked under his swinging, grasping arms. She pivoted, then, as he thundered past in a spray of mud, and kicked out, hard, with an added biotic flare, taking him in the back of the knee. She heard the crack and watched him stumble, and knew that she'd found her mark. There weren't many weak points on the krogan body - the knees and elbows, those recurved shins, the eyes and, of course, the quad on the males - but they were there to be taken advantage of if you only knew how. Lucky for her, she'd been taught by the best.

From there, the rest of the fight was almost too easy. Any given krogan would always have brute strength and mass over any given asari, but paid for it in speed and agility. She kept to his blind spot, behind his hump, as much as possible, focusing her attention on the same knee as before, working it until it could no longer support his weight. He made one last turn and lunge for her, and there was a dangerous moment when he managed to get a hand on her jacket and started to reel her in, but she slipped out of the garment, twisted, planted her foot solidly enough in his quad. He instantly doubled over, his breath left him in one pained explosion, and she met his head with her own when he tried to recover, straightening up. He blinked up at her for a few seconds in pained bewilderment, then his eyes rolled up into his head and he fell over sideways.

The circle of onlookers erupted into cheers as she snatched her jacket back up from the fallen krogan, slipped it over her old black and gold leathers, and spat again, the gob of purple this time landing smack in the middle of her downed foe's back.

"Right," she said when the noise had died down, cracking her knuckles and glaring out at the krogan dotted amongst the circle. "Anyone else got a problem with taking orders from me?"

When there were no takers - to her not insubstantial disappointment - she picked a pair of smirking krogan out from the crowd. "You two, get this sack of shit outta here. I want you other seven back up on the fucking wall. And the rest of you," she finished, rounding on the asari in the circle, "the show's over. Get back to whatever the hell it was you were doing."

The crowd quickly dispersed, chattering and laughing, the unlucky krogan dragged away by his heels by his comrades. Aethyta sighed inwardly. Put them to work, the kid had said. Keep them out of trouble, the kid had said. She may as well have said: Aethyta, go smack their fucking heads in. It wasn't that she _minded_ doing it – honestly, she'd been spoiling for a good fight for days now, to work off some tension- but the rest of the camp was getting antsy, and had reason to: krogan, in her experience, who'd been promised a fight tended to go looking for one when it didn't immediately eventuate.

A hundred and ten of them had come down on twelve turian drop ships, with supplies enough to last them more than a month of hard fighting. That made a hundred and five more than had been permitted to assemble together on Thessia since the Rebellions. At their head was the young krogan she'd recognised as Shepard's pet Urdnot: Grunt, the Tankborn.

He seemed like a good kid, from what little she'd seen, with a fairly impressive track record. You had to have serious quad to be accepted into Aralakh Company, let alone run it. They were heroes whose deeds were legend, the krogan that every krogan aspired to be. Her dad, whenever he got on the turps, could be goaded into singing about them, a little bit, and the great battles they'd had in that great, deep, rumbling voice of his.

This wasn't Aralakh Company, though. From what she'd heard, that fabled group had been entirely wiped out at some point during the war. Instead, what the Urdnot Wrex, the cunning old bastard, had sent was a collection of krogan from two dozen different clans, each vying for one of the twenty open spots that would form the backbone of the Company when it reformed. Most of them were out there, now, with two-thirds of the commandos and the kid, hunting down those fucking banshees and other Reaper remnants. These ten, however, had been left behind to help guard the camp, a duty that rankled some of them even more than it did her. There was no glory in babysitting civilians. But, as her dear departed mother had told her more than once: tough shit. The galaxy was far from fair, and if you continued to bitch about that fact, ways would certainly be found to make it even more so. If Berskin Tarn and Gutnar Krig and the rest of them felt that guard duty was beneath them, then there was always the option of digging latrines or hauling the dead to processing or the pyres - or getting sent the fuck back home to Tuchanka in disgrace.

"You've broken your nose again."

Aethyta cursed inwardly as Benezia stepped out from the dispersing crowd. She thought she'd spotted her, in amongst the circle of onlookers, but had been too preoccupied to pay Benezia any attention beyond that. She had, in fact, been trying very hard not to pay any attention to her at all for the past couple of days, working at her anger, nursing her grudges.

"Had to let him get one good shot in," she shrugged, wiping some of the blood from her lips and chin with the back of her hand and flicking it away. "Would've shamed him too much, otherwise, and then we woulda had a different problem when he woke up." She paused and cocked her head to one side, watching Benezia even as she was watched coolly in turn. "Is the part where you tell me that 'violence is not the answer'? That 'there's always another way?' He was a krogan. Word'll get around, now, that causing trouble in the camp will lead to a swift ass-kicking."

The pain was starting to creep in now as she spoke, from her nose and her jaw where the Tarn had landed his punch. She spat again, felt some of her teeth wobble when she probed them cautiously with her tongue. Could have been better. Could have been worse. But she was definitely slowing down. A decade ago, he'd never have managed to lay a finger on her after the first blow, let alone grab a fistful of her jacket. A decade ago, she wouldn't have fallen on her ass fighting a banshee either.

"Those arguments did not work when we were together, if you recall. I don't imagine they will start now." Benezia did not move, did not change expression. "Would you like me to set it for you?"

She almost said no. She should have said no. But Nezzie had done this for her at least a dozen times, and the alternative was sitting down in front of a mirror and doing it herself, which had never gone well. Even with the integration of the Pischan camp, swelling their little village into a town of almost two thousand, they still didn't have any proper medicos.

"Knock yourself out."

She found a seat for herself on the broad steps to one of the blocky, drab emergency shelters. The grey, unburnished metal of it was cold under her ass and mud-splattered to boot; the drops of rich purple blood that streamed from her nose to splatter against it seemed incredibly vivid as she bent over to one side and cautiously blew to clear it as best she could.

"Charming."

"Had to be done. You know that" she replied, straightening to find that Benezia was in the process of kneeling on the step below her. For one lovely moment, Benezia's tits, straining against the zipped-up, slightly too-small jacket, were at a perfect eye level. If Aethyta wanted to, she could lean forward, just a little bit, and bury her face between-

Shit.

This _was_ a bad idea. Her blood was always up after a fight, and she usually wanted nothing more than a stiff drink followed by a good fuck. Or vice versa. Or a stiff drink _and_ a good fuck. Where had that bar been? The one with the wood counter and the sticky lapezberry liquor that she'd licked-

Shit shit shit.

She was a matriarch for Athame's sake, not some randy matron. There was such a thing as self-control. And she was still royally pissed off at the asari to whom that magnificent rack belonged. Never mind that some of the best sex of her life had taken place after or even _while_ she'd been fighting with-

Shit. Shit shit shit.

Aethyta turned her head and spat again to cover her thoughts. This was insane. No, wait, it wasn't insane - it was _pathetic_. Lusting after the fucking ex. She just needed to get her nose dealt with, then go find someone who'd be up for a good fuck. Someone else. Maybe one of those nice krogan boys would be interested in a different sort of a tumble. It'd been at least five years since she'd had a krogan.

"Are you alright?"

"Fine," she said shortly. When she straightened herself again, Benezia had, mercifully, finished settling, sitting back on her heels so that their faces were level instead. Her face held cool concern, nothing more. "Just hurts. Hurry up, will you?"

Benezia arched one of those stupidly perfect eyebrows with its stupidly delicate markings, but made no comment other than: "Very well."

Benezia's hands found her face, gently tracing the line of her nose to find the breaks. Her fingertips were cool and smooth and steady. Aethyta closed her eyes as one of those hands fell to her cheek, then to her chin, turning her head this way and that to examine her in profile, trying not to remember where else those deft fingers had touched her before.

"It looks to be a simple break. One or two manipulations, I think." The hand returned to her nose, fingers firming up either side of where it most throbbed. "On the count of three."

Goddess, she'd always loved that voice. Benezia'd always had so much control over it too. She could project enough to be heard clearly across a room packed full of chattering airheads and drop back down to a whisper in the same breath, pitched so low that you and only you could hear the remark that followed.

"One..."

Maybe... Maybe they _should_ just fuck. Take the edge off. Get Benezia T'Soni out of her system for once and for all. Avoiding her clearly wasn't working.

Goddess, she wasn't seriously considering _that_. Insane. Pathetic.

"Two..."

There was a sudden increase in pressure, a sharp upwards spike in pain, and she felt as much as heard the horrible grinding noise and subsequent 'pop'.

"Aaargh! Ow! Goddess! Fuck!"

"Three," Benezia said dryly, releasing her.

"Fucking hell, Nezzie! You said _on_ three!" she accused, her eyes watering. "Fuck! Gah-"

"You always tense up if I do the full count," Benezia said. She sounded almost... amused? Yes, amused. "Now, quit being such a baby. You wouldn't want any of those nice young krogan boys to see you cry."

One of Benezia's hands found her chin again, tilting her head around to check her handiwork. She made a satisfied noise and released her.

"Done in one?" Aethyta asked, gingerly feeling out the damage.

"I believe so. You would, of course, do well to check it for yourself before using medigel to finish the job. I've not had to set a nose since Liara was twenty-five." When Aethyta looked askance, she elaborated, voice wry. "She was 'exploring the wild jungles of Nevos', I believe, and ran headlong into a tree."

She had to chuckle at the mental image that conjured up despite herself. She'd gotten a holo or vid of the kid every few months, at first, and then one every year or so until she'd left home. Sometimes, there'd be a letter. Sometimes, there wouldn't.

For the first decade, Aethtya had treated everything sent to her as an insult, salt rubbed into the raw, open wound. Benezia was flaunting the girl before her, the relationship with her lastborn that Nezzie had, for whatever reason, chosen to deny her. In the second decade, after the first hot flush of anger, bitterness and heartache had started to fade, she'd begun to wonder if the stuff Benezia sent her way wasn't actually some strange sort of almost-apology. Eventually, as curious as she'd been wary, she'd even written back. They'd only ever written of their daughter, the two of them, updates, advice, cordial arguments over schooling and more; tentative forays into the whys and hows of their own dead relationship had gone carefully unanswered.

By all she'd seen and read, Liara, at twenty-five, had been a bright-eyed but gangly, uncoordinated little thing, all elbows and knees and skinny little neck. She was adventurous and insatiably curious, much as Aethyta's own girls had been at that age, but had an academic streak that none of her three possessed. Melania had taken too much after her mother to be interested in a formal education, Zara had been disinterestedly pursuing a fine arts degree for around two hundred years now, and Khyvos, well... Aethyta loved Khyvos dearly, but she'd always had the attention span of a salarian on speed. Privately, Aethyta had wondered, sometimes, how in Athame's name her third daughter managed to raise her own children, let alone do so while running a business.

And, just like that, her desire fled. Her girls. Lunkheads the lot of them, but still hers. She could only hope that they were someplace safe. That they were still alive.

Benezia rose, wiping her hands clean on a dirty grey pant-leg, and looked down at her. Whatever she saw there made her frown, ever so slightly, in renewed concern.

"Are you certain-"

"I'm fine," she replied in a tone that brooked no argument. Forget the fuck; she'd finish fixing her nose, find her emergency brandy stash and get quietly drunk.

Benezia seemed unconvinced, but wisely elected not to press the issue.

"You should get to the medical tent before the swelling becomes too severe," she said, offering her hand.

Aethyta took it after only a moment's hesitation, and soon stood beside her former bondmate, surveying this little section of the camp. A half-dozen blocky, grimy, grey and white emergency shelters, stamped with the Armali seal, sat in two convex lines that blocked the rest of the camp from view. The buildings here served primarily as storehouses for food and the other bits and pieces they'd been able to salvage, and spent most of their time sealed shut. A large, open patch of ground stood in between the rows, muddy from the morning's rain and two different types of blood, bordered by a crude path of cargo lids and lengths of plasteel and other flat materials, laid to keep feet and hand-trolleys free from the muck. It was certainly nothing to write home about.

Wherever home was these days.

Abruptly, Benezia frowned and stepped forward, out into the mud.

"Do you hear that?" she asked, head tilted upwards to scan the grey sky.

Aethyta bit back an inane 'hear what?' just in time, and cocked her own head to the side, holding her breath to better listen for anything out of the ordinary. After perhaps ten seconds, she heard it too.

"One ship, I'd say. Maybe two" She cast about for somewhere with a better vantage point and was left only with the shelters themselves. Elsewhere in the camp, someone began to ring the warning bell - another of the kid's little, effective ideas. "Give me a lift, will you?"

Benezia looked at her in incomprehension for a second, then shook her head.

"I... don't know if I can anymore," she said, sudden nervousness in every line of her body. "I've not used my biotics since-"

"Past time you started again then," Aethyta replied. "Dive back into the ocean. I just want to have a quick look."

"I... Very well."

Benezia exhaled and drew herself up into her preferred casting stance, side on, her knees bent, feet planted firmly a shoulder width apart, one arm loosely extended while the other was held ready, in a fist at her side. Aethyta turned to the shelter and tensed for the lift. Of the two of them, Aethyta was the better fighter by far – Benezia had little inclination towards violence of any sort by nature or belief - but Benezia was the better biotic. She matched raw power at least as great as Aethyta's own with a finesse born of a lifetime's daily practice and study of both the modern and ancient arts. She could do with a flick of her wrist and a moment's thought what it took Aethyta a full arm and a minute's solid concentration.

The lift, though, never came, and when she turned back to find out what, it was to see Benezia frozen in place, body crackling with biotic energy.

"Hey," she said, and then repeated the call, more loudly. When no response came, she took a couple of steps towards her, and realised, with a horrible sinking feeling, that Benezia was gone again, in the same way she'd fallen into memory the first night they'd landed. Her eyes had a fixed, glazed look to them, her chest rising and falling rapidly, the colour drained from her face. She was talking, though, this time, soft, frantic words that became clearer as Aethyta took another cautious step forward.

"I can't. I won't. You won't make me. My daughter. I will not-"

"Hey," Aethyta tried again, edging closer still, enough to reach out and touch her if need be. Though, she considered, remembering Benezia's reaction that first night, physical contact probably wouldn't be the best of ideas.

The other matriarch's head jerked up as she neared, body straightening, face twisting into an uncharacteristic sneer.

"Have you ever faced an asari commando unit before?" Benezia said as their eyes met, her voice oddly hollow and dripping with contempt. "Few humans have."

"I'm not seeing too many humans around here-" Aethyta began, but Benezia didn't seem to hear her, reading instead off some internal script.

"I now realise I should have been stricter with her."

Aethyta frowned, puzzled.

"What-"

The next thing she knew was pinned in an impossibly strong stasis field, and the moment after that she was flying back into the storage shelter. She didn't even have time to flick up a barrier before she hit the building with a resounding _thunk_, hard enough to knock the wind clean out of her. She slid down the wall to land, wheezing, on her knees in the mud, shook her head to clear the stars from it and rolled to her feet, heart racing, a fresh wave of blood running from her nose, barrier up and ready for the next attack. Benezia, though, had turned away from her, bent over almost double, her hands at her temples.

"Benezia?" she hazarded, not quite daring to move. "Nezzie?"

"I- Goddess! I'm sorry. My baby girl. I'm sorry. I-"

That sounded like her again, at least. Aethyta edged cautiously out towards her once more, carefully circling around to approach from the front rather than behind. As she did, she caught sight of the small audience the altercation had gathered, a group of kids and one or two maidens, lurking awkwardly. She sent them her best glower.

"You lot - can't you see we're having a domestic? Scram."

They did, hastily, even as a small shuttle came humming in, low overhead, reminding them all as to why the alarm bell had been sounded. Aethyta spared it the barest of glances, enough to note the Republics symbol embossed on its side. Markings like that never meant much, least of all in times like these, but it was a small reassurance, none the less. And a shuttle that size could hold maybe five people, in a pinch, anyway. With ten krogan and two commandos on site, anyone who'd come here looking for trouble would quickly find it.

When she reached her former bondmate, Benezia was visibly trembling. The trembling only intensified when Aethyta slowly, carefully drew her up and into a light embrace, giving her every opportunity to pull away. Benezia clung to her instead, burying her head against Aethyta's shoulder while Aethyta awkwardly rubbed her back and tried desperately to think of something soothing to say. She'd never been very good at this sort of thing. Even with her girls, it had always felt so unnatural; when they'd come to her teary with dating trouble, for example, her instinct had always been, not to hold their hand, but to go out and kick the lout's head in.

Despite her silence, Benezia seemed to take something from the embrace, at least, the shaking more or less coming to an end by the time the 'all clear' bell sounded. She pulled away, pressing a still-trembling hand to her temple. She looked confused, exhausted and deathly pale, splattered with drops of Aethyta's own blood.

"Come on," Aethyta said, not unkindly. "Let's get you to somewhere you can lie down, huh?"

Benezia allowed herself to be led through the camp towards the freighter as if she were in a daze, both of them relatively oblivious to the ripple of excitement rapidly spreading through the camp. The ignorance did not last long, however, as the shuttle seen earlier had landed neatly beside their own craft. The shuttle's occupant stood at the centre of a growing crowd of asari, the krogan guards returning to their posts on the walls.

When Aethyta caught sight of the newcomer for herself, however, she stopped in her tracks, her blood running cold.

A Justicar. A fucking _Justicar_.

Aethyta had only seen a couple from the Order in person over her entire lifetime, and she'd never relished the experience. They were worse than Spectres. At least Spectres had an understanding of moral ambiguity, and had to answer to the Council. A Justicar was judge, jury and executioner in one neat package, answering only to a black and white Code that was at least five thousand years out of date.

It certainly didn't help that Aethyta had done a few things over the years that would put her on the wrong side of what passed for a Justicar's notion of 'justice'.

The Justicar was scanning the crowed slowly, even as she exchanged greetings with those who'd come out to see her. Seconds later, however, she was starting towards the pair of them with long, confidant strides, the crowd parting before her instantly, silently.

Aethyta's mind raced, trying to think of what she'd done that the Justicar could possibly know about. It was only when Benezia, at her side, drew herself up, drew herself away and stepped forward, that the realisation dawned.

"Oh," she said softly. "Shit."


	14. Benezia (thirteen)

**Thirteen: Benezia**

* * *

There should have been fear at the Justicar's relentless approach. Perhaps there should even have been terror. Instead, a strange sort of relief washed over Benezia, leaving an empty, hollow peace in its wake. Her breathing calmed. Her hands lost their tremble. Her legs felt stronger beneath her.

An end. The Justicar brought an end to it all. A Justicar was a clean and efficient killer. Benezia would not suffer, for all that she deserved to. She would, instead, have mercy, and her people would have justice, out in the open and in the light. She could answer for her crimes, legion as they were, and then she could rest. It would be over.

Benezia had not even realised how desperately she had wanted it to be so until she'd seen the flash of red and gold, and felt the crushing weight lift.

A brief pang of guilt rose at the thought, for those few she'd leave behind, but it fell as quickly as it had come. Liara had survived without her for decades, had survived the _war_ without her. Had grown up without her. She didn't need her anymore, and would recover from her loss better with a quick end at the hands of an unbiased arbiter. Aethyta, who Benezia had so wronged, could be there for her instead, if need be. And Benezia would be able to hurt no others from the grave.

She drew herself up, squaring her shoulders and raising her head, and stepped forward. Behind her, she heard Aethyta curse but ignored it, in much the same way she ignored the murmuring of the crowd and her former bondmate's sudden, hard grip on her arm and attempt to pull her back. Aethyta had time for one more curse before the Justicar reached them, Benezia shrugging herself free of her hand.

The Justicar was not one she had known previously, of that she was certain - and thankful. It would be hard to forget such a striking, square jaw and full, pouting lips, or those incredibly large, pale, staring eyes. She was of an age with Aethyta, judging by how any markings she'd possessed had faded into non-existence, but more powerfully muscled; she moved with the arrogant grace and confidence of a warrior born and forged. Her armour was a rich burgundy red and well-maintained, cut low through the chest as was the custom for the Order, to allow her foes the chance to strike at her heart. The ornate golden gorget that bound her to her oaths glinted dully in the wan afternoon sun as she stopped a handful of paces in front of them and inclined her head in greeting.

"In the light of Athame, I greet you, my sister," the Justicar said, her voice surprisingly light, with a trace of the accents of Serrice flavouring the words in the old priestess's tongue. "I am Samara, a servant of the Justicar Code. I have travelled long across land, sea and void to reach this place."

"I am Benezia, of Armali and Tis," Benezia replied, naming the place she called home and the city of her birth. "In the light of Athame, I bid you welcome, Samara, my sister. The Goddess has guided your steps to us. How may we serve your cause and your Code?"

The ancient words in the near-dead language slipped easily from her tongue, for all she'd had cause to say them but a handful of times. At least she _knew_ them, she supposed. Most asari these days knew only a bastardised, common-language version of the proper greeting for a Justicar, gleaned from over-hyped, poorly-researched vids. There was simply no need for them to learn. Justicars grew rarer by the century, and, in any event, were almost never officially given welcome into the sprawling cities where most asari resided, not anymore.

She felt another brief pang of guilt with the thought. The language, the knowledge of such traditions may well die with her, now, along with the memories of her mother and mother's mother and so on down the line. She had not shared them with her daughter, and all of her acolytes were dead. But perhaps a clean break was what the asari truly needed. For too long had her people been held hostage to their past.

"I have taken the Oath of Poverty. I may hold naught but mine arms and armour. I beg shelter and sustenance."

"Then share with us the bounty of Athame and take your place by our fire. Our homes are open to you. The food of our table is yours to share. The water of our wells is yours to drink. Have you aught to offer us in exchange?"

"I have taken the Oath of Preservation. I live only for the defence of our laws. I offer protection for the innocent, and to bring justice to the guilty."

"Then walk amongst our people and come to know them. Our hearts are open to you. Root out the betrayer and the deceiver, the thief and the smuggler, the rapist and the killer. Bring them to justice in the light of Athame, so that all others may know peace and live without fear."

She stepped forward, then, and held out her hands, palms up. The Justicar stepped forward herself and placed her own gloved hands, palm-down, within them. Together, they turned their hands over, and, with that, the greeting was done, and Aethyta was at her side again.

"Ok," she whispered urgently while Samara watched them both with ice-blue eyes, "you've said hello. Now let's get the hell out of here."

Benezia shook her head slightly, and ignored the repeated tug at her arm, keeping her eyes instead firmly fixed on the Justicar. She would face her fate with dignity and honesty. She would not flinch, nor try to flee.

"I seek justice," she announced, in the modern tongue and a loud, ringing voice.

"Benezia, no!" Aethyta hissed, but by then it was too late, as Benezia had known it would be.

The Justicar glanced at Aethyta before replying.

"What justice would you have?"

"I corrupted my followers," Benezia said, still loudly enough for those around her to hear. "I have killed without cause. I have violated the mind of another. I have worked against my own people to serve my own ends.

"I submit myself to your judgement," she concluded, and bowed, holding her hands out before her in supplication, palms up and crossed at the wrists.

And that was when it all went wrong.

"You want her," Aethyta said, stepping smartly between the two of them, "you're going to have to go through me."

Straightening, it was her turn to grab for her former bondmate's shoulder to try to pull her back. Aethyta was a born fighter, with a near perfect balance of aggression, adaptability, strength and stamina, but she was no Justicar, trained and sworn. And while she might have stood a chance against an initiate new to the Order, Aethyta had little to no hope of victory against one such as this Samara, of an age with her and hardened by centuries of following the harsh Code.

"Aethyta, stand down," she ordered as calmly as she could manage, even though her heart was suddenly racing within her chest, the tremors threatening a return to her body. "This is not your concern."

"You shut the fuck up right now, Benezia T'Soni," her former bondmate growled, glancing back at her. "I am _not_ explaining to the kid how you got yourself offed by a Justicar."

The Justicar regarded the pair of them for long moment.

"You speak of the events prior to Sovereign's attack upon the Citadel."

Aethyta and Benezia spoke at once.

"Don't answer-!"

"Yes."

"Then Justice has already been served," Samara announced, turning for all in the crowd to hear. "The Reapers are dead."

For a long moment, Benezia couldn't quite comprehend what she had just heard.

"But I-" she began, but the Justicar held up her hand for silence.

"I know something of indoctrination," she said, turning back, and there was a strange pride in her eyes along with sudden sorrow, "and the way it twisted the thoughts of those subject to it. All reputable accounts agree that you fell under its sway. All reputable accounts also agree that you resisted, and that, without your resistance, Commander Shepard would not have found the Conduit in time, if at all, dooming us all. Any crimes committed in service to Saren and the Reapers were not of your making."

What remained of her calm fled like a startled _kielly_, replaced by sudden desperation. The Justicar knew what she had done, but would not act!?

"No!" she burst out, pushing past Aethyta, wracking her brain, trying to remember what she knew of the Code, trying to find a way to frame her confession that would convince the Justicar of her guilt. "It was my fault! I led them all there! I should have known better, but I thought I was too strong to be swayed-"

A warm hand clamped itself across her mouth to silence her, an arm wound about her waist, pinning one of her own arms to her side and pulling her back against a soft, strong body. She struggled, kicking out, wrenching her head this way and that, but was rewarded only by a grunt of pain and an inexorable tightening of grip, until she thought all of the air was going to be squeezed out of her.

"Pride is a sin in many religions, but it is not a crime under the Code," Samara told her when Benezia's struggling had finally ceased, the Justicar's face devoid of expression. She then looked over at Aethyta.

"I did not come for her, or for anyone else in the camp. I am here at the request of her daughter. Or, rather," she continued turning to the side and gesturing behind her, to a slender, nervous-looking matron in plain white and grey formal gown with a multi-coloured warning tattoo upon one cheek, "my daughter is here at the request of hers."

* * *

"A Justicar! I can't believe you invited a fucking _Justicar_ here!"

Benezia lay on her back, staring blankly at the grey ceiling of the freighter's lone cabin, and listened to the argument taking place just outside the door. Her body felt leaden, exhausted - a match for her heart - but sleep would not come. She _ached_ too much for slumber, mind and body.

"Shepard trusts Samara! She was part of her team when they went through the Omega relay."

"Well, I'm not Shepard, am I? And I'm not the one fucking her either! Justicars. Are. _Trouble_! I can't put it any clearer than that, kid. Shepard's a human - she couldn't have had any idea of what they're really like. And you're too young-"

Liara had never raised her voice when they'd fought. She'd been all pouts and sullen looks, what words of defiance she managed said to the floor, and then often in a whisper. She had evidentially found her voice, however, while Benezia had been... away.

"Do _not_ tell me what I am too young to understand!" Liara's voice rose and fell like a whip. "I have done more in the last four _years_ than most asari do in _four centuries_!"

"And I don't doubt it!" Aethyta's tone was placating - but just barely. "I was _going_ to say that you're too young to _remember _Justicar Nikania. She got it in her head that a whole damn colony world was populated by slavers, and slaughtered everyone over thirty because she thought they were 'unjust'. _Five hundred people_ and a Spectre died before she was brought down."

"Was she right?"

"No! Turned out that she'd been fed a load of bad intel. That's the thing with Justicars, kid - they're not like they are in the vids. They're brainwashed fanatics with a license to kill and a morality code that was outdated when my great-great grandma was still on the tit. They make mistakes, and when they go bad, they go _real_ bad, _real_ quick. And, hell, they don't even need to make mistakes for things to go bad on you. All it'll take is one wrong word from someone in the camp, and you'll wind up with a load of bodies on your hands and a smug Justicar. If I hadn't been there, your mother would have found some way she'd violated that goddess-damned Code in order to get herself killed."

Aethyta had never liked Justicars, Benezia vaguely remembered, or other such 'over-romanticised, out-dated relics'. She'd never much cared for Spectres either, which Benezia had always thought odd and more than slightly hypocritical. Professionally, Aethyta had always operated outside of the law as often as she'd stayed within it, first as a freelancer and later as a covert operative of High Command. Aethyta was a spy, a thief, a saboteur and, when the mood struck her, an outrageous liar; a former stripper, a former merc, a former smuggler and more. She was the master of hiding in plain sight, her brash personality and unabashed fondness for brawling, drinking and casual sex fitting few people's mental model of 'spy'. But, beneath the bluster she was patient, methodical and whip-smart, as comfortable running long-term surveillance as enacting an explosive hostage extraction.

They'd met, of course, on one of her jobs. Benezia had been the target.

"Shepard trusts her and that is enough for me."

"Well, bully for you. Just don't expect me to have anything to do with her. And you keep her away from your mother. I dunno about you, but I'm not looking to repeat this afternoon any time soon."

"I'm planning to send Samara out with Grunt and his company tomorrow. They've fought together before; I believe that Grunt is looking forward to it."

"What are you going to do with the Ardat-Yakshi then? Send her out too?" A derisive snort. "Kid looks like she'd keel over if you farted in her general direction."

"That 'kid' has a name. It's Falere. She has been through a lot, and she is stronger than she looks."

"I damn well hope so. And you haven't answered my question: you sending her out?"

"The monastery on Lesuss was self-sustaining. They grew their own food and - I am sure you'll be pleased to know - brewed their own alcohol. Falere has agreed to help us with growing food, if we can."

"I'm no farmer, but I think we're going to have to hope for a change in the weather to get anything growing again. Or maybe some atmospheric scrubbers to get rid of all that fucking ash."

"I know. I'm looking into it, and to alternatives. The Liveships are in the process of being dismantled, but Tali has agreed to send us some quarian hydroponics experts and equipment once they're more settled-"

Their voices grew fainter as she listened, and Benezia realised that they were moving away. She turned over onto her side, curled up into a ball and stared at the grey wall instead. Her thoughts were a dazed, muddled, painful mess, impossible to sort out. The words of seconds before mingled with other voices, some long dead, some demanding, some pleading, some screaming, all bouncing around inside her skull until her teeth ached. Fragments of memory, faces flashed behind her eyes every time she closed them. Saren. The ship. The Justicar. Shiala. Umbri. The rachni queen. Rosi. Liara. Aethyta.

_It'll pass_, Aethyta had told her. _You'll pull through._

She could not see how.

She must eventually have slept for a time, for the next thing she knew was the rustle of blankets as the covers were slowly drawn back up over her, and a soft, low voice talking without any expectation of being heard. Benezia did not move, nor did she open her eyes, even when Liara carefully sat on the bed beside her and gently laid a hand upon her arm, above the bruises Aethyta had left.

"I'm sorry," her daughter was saying, her voice at once distant and thick with emotion. "I do these things, sometimes, without fully thinking about the consequences. It was the same with Shepard. And then the... yahg. I suppose those both worked out in the end, but, goddess, it was a near thing! Both times.

"I guess... I suppose we can only hope that this works out too. But I don't think that Aethyta knows what to do about it anymore. I don't really either. I thought, perhaps, you could work with Falere once she starts. You always loved to garden, and it is kind of similar. Growing things."

A soft sigh.

"I miss your gardens. I miss our home. I miss Armali and Thessia, the way they used to be. I miss being able to get lost in dig sites for months on end. I miss not having to worry about keeping everyone fed and clothed and tracking down relatives for orphans and arguing with matriarchs eight times my age and wondering whether or not Shepard will-" Her voice caught, her breath hitched, and it was a long, silent moment before Liara spoke again.

"I love you, Mother, no matter what has happened. And I am here for you, as best as I can be."

There was the press of a kiss on her brow, the shifting of weight from the bed, retreating footsteps and the swish of the door. When Benezia opened her eyes again, she was alone, with only the gloom of the cabin and the grey, featureless wall for company. There were no tears. She didn't think she had any left.


End file.
